amateur sonic laboratory

D-003f

it was a party. that meant having to pay attention. things and people were in the world, and he was too. it’s so easy to forget that. it’s not so easy to know why you need to remember. what he did to cope was smile and project joviality and stare out the window as if about to open a conversation with someone about something he saw out there. the windows were low to the floor in this old building, giving the room a cozy and accessible feeling as he leaned down onto the sill. when he stuck his head out the window the faint pressure of the freeway sound cupped his ears, the people’s voices were placed in context, and the breath of breeze made the carpet smell again. dust and cup circles stuck to his sleeve.
there was the smell of the alley, and there was the alley. there was the brick of the next building securely close, and there was water left in that concrete drainage rut down the middle of the pavement, and there was a comfortable amount of trash swimming in it. there was the orange sodium lighting that made the outside seem inside and made the cold that much warmer. there were the waxy leaves of trees on the corner melting out of the dark, and the rough sides of their trunks with shadowy pits. there were, most of all, the huge transformer plugs in the wall across the alley, distributed as the apartments behind them were, four each, giving presence to the building with their triple-stacked cones that filled the view like faces. the masses of wires, frayed and new, rusted and shining, were tied to them in any sort of way like it was all anathema to the reinvention of the wheel, and like nobody even remembered that it came from scratch. the wires trailed up and over to wood poles and past the top of the building he was in, deliniating the sky, a sector for each of the few stars he could see.
he settled in on his knees on the old dusty carpet, comfortably fit to the low sill, and looked and smelled and listened, and forgot who he was. then he saw a bird flying into the scene, and another. only they were glowing green in patterns on their backs, and he saw that they weren’t at all birds, but they were huge moths, little hairs growing out of the joints in the plates of their abdomens where they were soft and beating, little hairs lit green by their bioluminescence. their antennea were fine ferns sprouting from just between their oddly reflective hemispheres of eyes that were oily ringed in the soft and silent glow. and their wings were large and satin, dim on the bottoms and grey, glowing in patches and circles ordered on the tops. their legs, hooked at the knees and each tapering to its slender point, were tucked below in a repetition that drew the eye along the lengths of their bodies again and again. he watched them slowly move masses of air with the beat of their wings that were too slow to produce a sound, though he smelled the night in a pick-up of breeze. they soared and slow-fluttered, those oversized beings, smoothly changing direction.
he watched, caught in the draw of their glow, as they alighted on the wall across. such beautiful, slow creatures. why had he never seen them before? he wondered about their cycles and habits. he watched their wings slow, cooling down from the silent journey, the rests between movements longer, slightly longer. he nearly remarked on them when one moth began to speed its wings again. but it was a different kind of movement, almost spastic. the other swooped into the air as the first began to shudder. it shook a slow panic, screaming only in his mind. it vibrated in a circular dry heave with no mouth to spew from, its movements getting faster as its wings began to wither and its light dimmed out, and a hiss came forth as it began to smoke and dry. the heaving stopped when its joints had fused together, and it cracked off from the transformer plugs on which it had landed, falling straight but lightly to the alley floor with the sound of a dried maple leaf.
his throat was tight with the scream it never cried, and he looked again to the remaining moth, gliding in circles below the lattice of cables. the moth beat its wings to the heartbeat of sleep and circled softly, spiraled downward, serenely spinning. he tried to be lost again in its splendor, but his scream began to leak with the dying hiss of its heated gasses escaping, when it alit again on the wall across. his scream gained a small pathetic voice as he watched its throes again. the wing beat slowed, the quiver took, and violently gained its life. the fuzzy glow of the wings faded off and they wilted greyly, smoking, crackling, hissing as its blood boiled, evaporated, and jetted out its softly beating joints, fusing them shut, popping as it rebroke its seals, the pressure conforming. and it, too, cracked off the transformer plugs and dropped in a line to the alley floor where it hit with the sound of a bamboo rake.
they were gone, and he had just seen them for the first time. (read less)

D-003f

it was a party. that meant having to pay attention. things and people were in the world, and he was too. it’s so easy to forget that. it’s not so easy to know why you need to remember. what he did to cope was smile and project joviality and stare out the window as if about to open a conversation with someone about something he saw out there. the windows were low to the floor in this old building, giving the room a cozy and accessible feeling as he leaned down onto the sill. when he... (read more)