An Excerpt From My Novel, “Parade”
Enjoy Chapter Two of my Fever Dream Novel
Intoxicated by the honey scent that lingered on my fingertips, I grinned a full smile, broad and bursting with elation. I screamed in laughter and ignored the frightened looks and scowls from people I passed on the street. I stretched my arms over my head. Thank God I’m alive! I felt ripe — ripe as my woman’s lips.
Few other people walked around me, but the street itself hummed with the living. Each car that passed pushed the sound waves to either side, only for those seconds, before they would SNAP back into place, continuing their hypnotic rhythm.
I hummed, too, like a comet that lacked arching grace. I jittered down the street and everyone I passed started to vaporize into the orange, sunset atmosphere. The sidewalk kept glittering as they vanished, unperturbed. Glorious solitude. I felt freedom from their judgment, their senseless, social regulations. I cheered every time someone puffed up into smoke, happy that they were gone and happy it hadn’t been me instead.
The sidewalk undulating in front of me, I strutted down a promenade of clacking roller coaster tracks. I passed alley after alley in this filthy, desecrated city, each one more sun-drenched than the last. I stopped and stared into every exquisite backstreet. Each contained an entire forest, broad as the space between two buildings but infinitely deep and vast, with trees swallowing the horizon whole. They were evidence of a before world, artifacts carved out from the concrete jungle, of a slow, brimming, primordial life. From the edge of the crumbling concrete, I peered into the years before the settlement, before development, before civilization had recognized capitalism as its new god.
The clouds parted and poured prisms of light into each alley like Heaven emptying its contents back into the earthly world, forgotten ghosts returning to an equally forgotten time. I gazed into these overgrown alleys, creaking with ever-proliferating life. Within each passage grew a cloud of birds, all fluttering and prim. Leading the swell was the hoopoe drum major, with his elaborate feather shako, marching knee to chest and beating his baton against his full, extended breast. There were the heather falcon color guards, intense and moving proudly in allegiance to nothing in particular, as blind as nationalism itself. The finches crooned into their flutes while the fregatidae murmured into the mellophones, and the treeswifts and true swifts alike wailed into the clarinets like a whistling train. Birds everywhere, swooping in thick trills of pastels, magenta, and ruby. Plumb jays, honeyguides, tangerine- and tan-tinted finches, and beautiful birds of paradise, all coffee- and saffron-hued. Even middling yard birds preened their finery alongside birds painted blue as lapis lazuli. Had I not gotten lost in these backstreets, I would never have seen those passiongales swelling in a cirrus sea against the gilded amber skies, this marching band of wildfowl, an eccentric parade of music and plume.
Some of these alleys were so pregnant with fruiting groves, I wondered if my woman sat here to feast and thus stained her lips so plumb. The orange harvests brimmed so full, and the sky was barely visible from under those native trees. I looked upon a firmament made entirely out of citrus fruit. These thick forests were spotted with bevies of deer, their giant, shy eyes seeking the sweet summer grass through curls of lacing lilacs. Their fragile, thin legs quietly brushed through gossamer wreaths of spiderwebs and dainty pools of rainfall. Long-necked and gentle, they too stopped and took in the entire splendor of the earth contained in these simple paradises.
As night continued to overtake the day, the animals began to settle themselves for sleep. Birds settled together in pairs, their bodies resting together like warm, feathered hearts. Curled up safe in the brush, there slept the deer. Even the orange trees drooped comfortably, resting from their long day of photosynthesis. Night fell and the world fell blue. The fireflies stuck out like falling diamonds.
I smirked to myself, ready to transform just as the world had into night.
