Walking past thousands of openings in the ether, long reddish cracks in a seemingly invisible wall, as they would appear to the trained eye, we were truly happy. Lyanna held my hand—something she usually didn't do for some unknown, inexplicable reason. I, on the other hand, was a romantic fool; hence, I loved holding her hand, showing her, and the whole fucking world, that I belonged to her. That I was her grangent, and nobody else's…
We always found ourselves in Magdalena, a quaint, abandoned town nestled far in the western reaches, Lya and I, as we ventured into the Spree. I didn’t know why. And I had never really thought about it. Until now. Something had changed. An unfamiliarity settled in, akin to a glitch in the synaptic code—subtle yet present, behind the scenes—rendering the details of our surroundings more vivid; the once-dimmed sun now brighter, the pale blue sky intensifying, and the weight of the prairie dust seeming to lift…
Breakfast. I always got my breakfast at Pushkin's. It didn't matter how early, how late, how tired, or how stoned I was—the coffee shop next to our apartment building had become my steady waterhole. The gent that owned it, Greg Pushkin—a middle-aged Russian immigrant from the Cuban colonies in the Atlantic—was a good friend, or rather, he'd become one, because I would always pay him straight up, with either creds or dope…
Lyanna was sound asleep. I looked at her. My eyes touched her silky smooth skin, lingered there for a while, then regressed, slowly, back into a semi-dark, blueish abysmal world of nightly dread and anguish—the buzzing strobe-light from the handheld projected screen faintly mirrored my pale, unshaven face on the wall…
It never stopped raining. It never ever stopped raining. Hence, the crimson red always washed away. Good, or bad? I didn't know. I didn't wanna know.
"Inexplicably dead, this man is, isn't he?" I thought, and turned to Lya to get her beautiful but sad-looking face remapped in the kibershop window in front of us…
Step into the dystopian future of Spree, a genre-blending novella that throws all the storytelling rules out the window. Think sci-fi, cyberpunk, and then some—it's a wild journey that keeps morphing with every tweak and cut. This isn't your typical tale; it's a live experiment, guiding you through an unpredictable mental maze where the lines between reality and fiction, sanity and madness, are constantly getting smudged. Just like the portrayed instability, this adventure will leave you contemplating the dynamic nature of stories and the worlds they conjure, especially when they vanish.
We always found ourselves in Magdalena, a quaint, abandoned town nestled far in the western reaches, Lya and I, as we ventured into the Spree. I didn’t know why. And I had never really thought about it. Until now…
Great, loving essay on Samuel Johnson by Henry Oliver, thank you for the link.
Oliver is right, there isn't one special book that defines Johnson, each of his works somehow feels a little unremarkable in isolation. It's Johnson's tone, the reflective posture, that make him.
And Oliver callling Johnson the JS Bach of English prose is ingenious. Jup, Johnson is the Bach of English prose.