Today and yesterday are hard to distinguish from one another for their grayness. The promise of rain lingers, unfulfilled. If it gets colder, the promise of snow will hang like the sword of Damocles, its tether of spider’s silk straining, straining, and straining, but its break is held somewhere outside of time and it may never come. Or it will come too soon. That is the problem with hanging swords; they are suspended by spider webs outside of time. But time is all the gods in their caprice have granted mere, mortal humans. The sky is gray. Like metal. Like grime. Like the underside of a clean, but scruffy street-rat. Clouds from here to there, and beyond there…stretching endlessly. The air was warm, however, and with alien indolence, the trees in Malá Strana have come into bud, just like the trees in Letná, and in Františkanska Garden…the hidden place. The trees whisper their lies that it is spring, that warmth is on its way. Lies… --Which is why he comes underground. To shelter, in darkness, from the grayness. From the lie of spring. The stones here are warm; the smokes and voices that fill the air are a comfort. Coca Cola is a comfort, and the bartender too. On other days, beer offers quiet succor, but not today. Coca Cola is all that it takes. There are voices, but it is empty here. No one disturbs him at the bar. He can sit with his thoughts and messages whispered from the electromagnetic ether that hazes the city like some strange pollution. It reaches even here, through the rocks, through the centuries of mud, now calcified like the very trilobites you can find if you dig far enough under the streets. He doesn’t know who watches him now. He doesn’t care. His concerns are focused on the things that the ether tells him, things whispered into the small daemon he keeps in his pocket. The daemon translates these whispers into silent, black words. From a distance, they are insects of some strange breed, and only he knows what they say. Perhaps they say something good, because he smiles, once, takes a sip of his cola and rolls a well-stuffed home-made cigarette… **** I don’t actually know this guy. YET. But I’ve seen him at U Sudu a few times…and always, he was twiddling with his cell phone…a common enough occurrence in Prague since land lines are RARE. I scribbled impressions of him and that moment in the bar on the back of a napkin, and what you’ve read above is pretty much exactly as it appears on that napkin. As always, I thank you for viewing and reading, and commenting. And hopefully everyone is off to a good week!