1st
Splinter Transport
A new kind of public transportation. Picture some antique dance, a mass of people marching forward through a hall, every few steps a man or woman spirals off to the left - the main mass marches forward. I had to be careful which car I boarded, each successive car having a different splintered destination off the main track, and each only able to break away at some very specific point. And I had to be in collusion with the rest of the passengers in my car - at the point where our car could splinter off, it would only do so if all of us rushed to the left side together. The red-head taught me this, I was ignoring that he was 14, but I knew it in my heart and would later read it on a newspaper headline. A foreignor had watched me fumble with the ticket machine, and, under the guise of helping me, had begun jamming foreign currency into the coin slots. “That won’t work!” When he leaves, bowing, I see he’s taken the ticket I’d purchased before he arrived. Red-head helps, buys a new ticket, shows me how to run toward the side of the train at our intersection. Everyone loves this part! Again, a tram-side zoo. A man strategically a statue so that the birds settle around him and then SHIMMY, so that we can see them fly. An old man presides over an ampitheatre he’s made of the bones and skulls of “hyenas.” I can plainly see they are boars or some sort of wild pig instead, the flesh and hair still attached and mixed with concrete. “This was the wrong animal to use.” Turtles swim by UPSTREAM. If they’ve come to Montana it must mean we’re close to the end. Off the tram, I lose him in the crowd. I get a voicemail. “Isn’t it so much better that you can’t see me now?” Later, I lose trust in the pilot of a glider plane and jump off, run away down a tunnel.
