Kevin's Watch

Wrote this recently as the opening to a new story. Not my usual. I'm stopping here for now - I've given in, and I'm actually going to try to write an outline for this one before going any further. Anyway, I wanted opinions on how well this works as an introduction to the city of Del-fi.

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Clarus folded up the newspaper and placed it into an inside pocket of his long coat. Stepping away from the newsstand, he slipped back among the inner-city crowds of ÑF. Citizens of Del-fi (as they called it) pressed in around him, rushing back and forth between jobs and home; home and school; school and work; place to place and action to action, each playing their tiny part, gears in the greater workings of the metropolis. The air was filled with a constant hum of voices, vehicles, machinery, and the fliers passing in all directions overhead. Clarus lost himself in the throng, and let the ebb and flow of the crowd carry him off down the Edelstrasse and out from Astor Fel. The avenue was lined with businesses and department stores in their multi-story structures of steel and glass; in between them, in the alleyway openings and empty yards stood the vendors with their carts, hawking papers, magazines, confectionary, hotdogs, and second-hand doc-sheets. The sky was coloured violet with the early hours of dusk, but the city does not rest: as one man lays down his head, another rises and heads out into the world, ready to take his part in the perpetual city. Every street is a constant press of flesh.
The people of Del-fi come in all kinds – tall and short; light- and dark-skinned; fat and thin and round and straight and hideous and beautiful. They passed Clarus in their hundreds, in as many styles of dress. A smooth-skinned, dark-haired beauty, in a miniskirt and tiny top; a wart-nosed businessman swathed in the folds of a blood-red cloak; a young girl in a strangely cut dress, too-large eyes of a stunning sea green, chewing gum loudly; a woman, pale, in a crumpled suit and carrying a battered old briefcase; a stranger, tall, his long white coat hanging to his ankles, thin white hair hanging down to his shoulders - grey eyes watching the crowd, he moved through them, with them, down the Edelstrasse toward Astor Central.
He passed beneath an immense ivory arch, and was in the centre. From the avenues branched out to all the districts of Astor, from the peripheral streets of Mon to the hubward sprawl of Lay. The Astor Radius cut across the Central like a knife drawn across the district, pushing the houses aside to form the wide boulevard the ran from one end of Astor to the other and then further, into the heart of Del-fi.

It was a dark and stormy night in the sky above Del-fi. Wind swayed the tops of the tall towers of steel and glass, rain lashed the windows of the luxury offices, home to the rulers of this vast and ancient metropolis. It was a stormy night, but the streets of Del-fi are never dark. Far below those wind-swept heights, beneath the sheer facades of the corporate towers, the streets thronged. The night-shift vendors huddled behind their carts, pulled up their plastic canopies, and called out their wares through the glare of artificial light flooding the air around them.
Del-fi shone. The rain catching the sharp glow of the streetlamps, filled the air with a thousand thousand dancing sparks that flickered in and out of vision - flashing, shining, falling; and gone in a milisecond. A million souls went about their nightly business as the air above them danced. The wind, shattered, scattered, and broken against the towers of the ethereal city never reached the crowd below. The city pays no attention to weather; to the seasons of the year; to the rising and setting of the sun. The city has grown beyond nature. The city has beaten it.
Fuck the fucking city, Simon thinks - this is beautiful.

I was dying in a corner of the old junktown when the machines found me. They took me in; patched me up; better than new. Hurt like hell - the bastards don't understand the human body so well. They don't get the whole 'pain' deal. So they cut me up, fix what's broken, and stitch me back together again. I wake up with a blinding headache and smooth skin where the scars should be. Not that I'm grateful for it. Likely I was better off dead than alive, with Enforcement after my skin.
Didn't even do that much - bit of trafficking for the big man, mostly. It got complicated, though. Should've seen it coming. Big man goes down, suddenly everyone's after his people, even part-timers like me. Couple of lackeys track me down, there's some nasty business with a gun, and suddenly I'm all over the newsfeeds, face on every docsheet. Guess the cleaners didn't get round soon enough. Forensics all over the place, lifting every hair, every skin flake, and there I was, bleeding my guts out in some scrapheap on the perimeter. Fucking robots should've let me die.
Instead, here I am, all better. Better is the word for it all right. Where they couldn't stitch flesh back together, they replaced it. I'm still not sure how much they 'fixed', they patch you up too well for that - not a bruise or scar to show work's been done. Head's been killing me ever since, though. Sometimes gets a little hard to take, but the worst parts pass soon enough. Just wish they didn't always come back. The machines told me it would stop in a day or two, but I think they just wanted me to shut up.
They creep me out. Humanoid and yet oh so alien. The ones that speak, that is. The other ones, the ones that lurk in the junkyards, the ones who speak in a stream of noughts and ones on the airwaves - those ones are far from human. And yet, and yet I had never heard of them before. No clues, no rumours. Not even a conspiracy theory - and in this city, with a nutcase shouting on every street corner, that could only mean that someone didn't want us to know.

Excellent. Some of your best in fact I think Murrin.

Avatar wrote:The thought that poetry has to rhyme is a sad fiction that's probably spoiled the "genre" for many aspiring poets.

--A

Loremaster wrote: The great Wilfred Owen got around that corner by using pararhyme.

Murrin wrote:My problem, really, is that I can't come up with stories. I come up with a setting, a single event, a line of prose. If I could come up with an actual story to tell, I might manage to write it.

Loremaster wrote:Murrin, this is great. Loved it. Alot. The imagery is fantastic and it is well written. Some of the lines were great, but there are so many that are good.

In the sky above Del-fi, wind swayed the tops of the tall luxury offices, home to the rulers of this vast metropolis. It was a stormy night, but the streets of Del-fi are never dark. Far below those sheer facades of the corporate wind-swept heights, beneath the towers the streets thronged. The night-shift vendors put up their plastic canopies, huddled behind their carts, looked through the glare of artificial light and called out their wares. Del-fi shone. The rain caught flooding the air around the streetlamps filled the air with the sharp glow of sparks that flickered in a thousand thousand [shapes?] dancing, falling; and gone in a moment of vision - flashing, shining about their nightly business. A million souls went as the wind, shattered, scattered; [the] air above them danced. The ethereal city never broken against the towers pays no attention to weather to the rising and setting of the seasons of the year nature. The city has beaten the sun. The city has grown beyond. Simon thinks - This is beautiful. Fuck the fucking city.