To the south, the city’s ruin is more apparent. The sky—like gunmetal, like ghosts, like frost, not yet fallen—remains featureless and gray. Daylight and night are little more than variations in color. No one has seen the stars for as long as he has been here. He remembers sunlight; the warmth of it, and the manner in which it turned his skin red, and then golden tan. He remembers the last day of sunlight: crossing a bridge (his flip-flops slapping at the soles of his feet) at one hour past noon, a back pack heavy and pulling at his shoulders. A tattoo--BELOVED in crisp, black ink--a jarring contrast to the orchid pallor of his skin. It had been a hot day, when he crossed the bridge (heading north, to a place he cannot remember.) Summer remained at some distance away, and so he hadn’t yet burned, tanned, and settled (quietly) into the normal summer-variation of his normal, doughy skin-tone. Now, long after the panic, the evacuation, and the strange things that have become day-to-day life, he meanders through the city’s southern reaches. Things were worse when it happened here. Perhaps it started here. The area is empty now: home to animals and ghosts, if to anything at all. Those who remain have moved north of the bridge he crossed on the city’s last sunny day. He has come—with other scavengers—to look for something: signs of the change, maybe, or a load of metal to drag back north. A different city begins to grow now: it is embryonic, fragile, and confined to the boundaries of a park wedged against the river. South of this new city, Chinatown looms with broken windows and drooping, rotting pagodas. Bats live there. Cats too. Dogs howl in the night, like wolves or like coyotes, only on one ever sees them. The cats are far more plentiful: everyone sees them; whole colonies of them have moved into the camp and established themselves as purring, affectionate rat-catchers and garbage thieves. There is a need for copper in the camp, and he has promised to keep an eye open for the gleaming, reddish-brown stuff. So far, he finds only rust and oil, and occasional drifts of that popping white stuff everyone calls snow. No one knows what it really is, but it drifts down from featureless gray clouds and accumulates (like snow) on days of low humidity. It only falls in spring and in summer: blackening on cooler days and dissolving like some odd slurry into the ground. There is no copper hear, but there are metals of other breeds: steel and iron, aluminum—dented and crusted with mud and bird drops. It has rained and so water beads on the metal or runs into oil-swirled puddles. He pauses, now and contemplates the shapes of oil on water like broken, wind-stirred skin. There are meanings, he thinks, in the shapes the oil has formed; and, perhaps, answers to what has happened. Or perhaps not. * * * I’d begun a tale, a bit of a while back in my gallery, concerning the inhabitants of a world in which things changed in odd, surreal ways, and for undisclosed reasons. I’d intended to write a full story concerning that world, but so far, nothing has developed. The text here is just one small glimpse into that world, inspired by…well…oil, water, and metal found in a truck-yard. I suspect that when a story does emerge. It’ll have a lot to do with the rusty, oily decay that identifies a particular antifreeze-contaminated plot of Chicago South-Side real estate. I took this photo yesterday, while hunting for other photographic subjects in a rather water-logged, muddy and grungy truck yard in a rather water-logged region of Chicago. I rather liked the freeform abstracts formed by oil-film on water, and so here you have it. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.