Industrial Resonance by Ember Jones

I sit in the back stairwell

and breathe in the little spaces

between

each letter.

A quiet, submissive moment spent

hunkered in the dim. Outside, I listen to

a chorus of cicada, a familiar hum

burrowed just underneath

all that awkward stillness. Inside, strange

yellow fluorescent lights are

pulsing

to mollify the rhythm

of the cicada.

Somewhere in the distance, an elevator

beeps and whirs softly, dutifully making

a slow lurching

stop at each

floor, grudgingly filling her belly with

the knobby elbows and knees and

gangly fingers of

hungry dreamers and vomiting

them back out again at the

bottom floor. I feel her tendons

aching as she rises again

through the dull, hollow shaft, humming

quietly to herself in the gloom

to mollify

the dark.

Time doesn’t pass like it usually

does, buried here, just underneath

the strange yellow corner

of the stairwell. I let myself grow a

little older. I am thousands of bodies

lonelier in a swarm of cicadas, each humming

its own rhythm,

demanding

I listen. I am

lurching slowly through

every emotion groaning deep

and low in my stomach, every little

breath drawn achingly

between the spaces of each

tiny letter.

I find myself humming

to the sound of the

cicadas and the elevator, careful

not to draw attention to

the body in the corner of the strange

yellow stairwell, hunkered

quietly

in the dim.