Click HERE to hear something nice. * Beneath his feet, the earth is still. The earth is dry; though the rains have come, the sun—voracious and thirsty—has consumed the fragile moisture. There may be a little: deep down, stored in the skins of worms in their tunnels, stored by the scrupulous industry of ants in their queendoms. There may be a little—maybe—where he cannot feel it. Underfoot. Where the earth is still and lifeless, despite the worms and the ants. The world is a different place here: the city bears a name that leaves the rime of mispronunciation on his tongue. He walks on an easterly course, accompanied—for only an instant—by a curious wasp: a hornet, he thinks, judging by the particular, papery buzz of her wings. There are no wasp-doctors here: no-one to name the wasps and to tend their hives. The wasps, like the people of this city, bear names he does not know and stories he cannot comprehend. They are alien things. They defy him, often in silence. The wasp leaves him: the sound of her wings recedes. Though she is a stranger, her name and her hive unknown, he feels a twinge of loss at her idle departure.... * He is far from where he started, and he can feel the day’s small journey in the meat of his soles. The sun has moved, and now it draws moisture from within him. The city is a different place here: though wars have not torn this place apart, there are derelict buildings, voicing the quiet lie that warfare has torn through the fabric of this city. There are many lies here, but he understands only a few of them. He has not come to hear the lies, however, nor has he come to think of the war-that-didn’t-happen-despite-what-the-buildings-say. The sound of a familiar heartbeat has drawn him: the siren song of a small drum. He recognizes the pattern, the skill within the rhythm. There are a few familiar people in this city, immigrants like himself. He knows a few of them. He knows the drummer. A friend. He finds his friend at the start of the complex, drum-born rhythms. The building, when he enters it, smells of rats and dust, and something mummified. He finds his friend, seated on two stacked milk-crates, tapping a complex braid of rhythms with his fingertips and his palms. There is another milk-crate and he turns it over, making a seat for himself. He listens to the sounds made by the hands of a familiar friend, and after a while, there is long, contemplative silence. “I walked to Pekkúr today,” his friend says. “It was a nice journey.” “I’d like to go there, too.” “Wear my sandals…they know the way.” And there, in a building, shattered by its lies of warfare, he exchanges sandals with his friend. “Enjoy your trip,” his friend says. “Go well.” He nods, smiling. “Come back tomorrow,” his friend says in their shared, national language. “We’ll talk about our trips.” * I’d intended on posting something else, but I wasn’t yet done with combining images and capturing…um…well…monetary and unreal cities. The two images here, are an indication of that. Though they aren’t exclusively derived from the last 6 images on my camera, the guy in the “Shiny” shirt is the most recent character captured by my lens. It wasn’t until I saw the initial photograph that I recognized him as a fellow fan of Firefly and its spin-off movie Serenity. In terms of storytelling, characterization, and quirkiness, Firefly is indeed, shiny, if shiny means good. Only in Firefly would you hear a character declare: “You ought not stand for that kind of behavior. If somebody tries to kill you, you try to kill ‘em right back.” Yeah. Shiny. As always, thank you for viewing, reading and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week. **Oh, and this is big...ZOOM helps.