Journal
Dispatches and speculations from the American roadside.
Jabs
Instructional videos at the train station teach me how to behave in 2020. If there’s gunfire, take cover. Silence your cellphone.
Salmiakki
Meanwhile the television says things like “jawbone damage may occur” and “America’s most trusted home surveillance system.”
Virus
She scrolls through websites that sell protective face masks while I half-watch a conspiratorial documentary about our hyper-mediated world.
Pattern
The machine says tens of millions of people will flood into Las Vegas as well as Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, and Houston.
Bow
Billboards along Interstate 90 tell me that God owes us nothing, love is an action verb, and the key to forgiveness was hung on the cross.
Perfect
A man studies yesterday’s horoscopes on the train. He carefully highlights a line that says today is the day to take action.
Event
Debate night in America. We tune in because we need to know: Who can withstand the punishment of live television?
Love
I remember sitting in a cathedral on a snowy February morning and watching an elderly couple hold hands.
Eye
Sharks have a transparent membrane that allows them to see despite the blood and carnage that fills the water when it attacks.
Lake
The 45th parallel is the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole, and you can feel the geography shift when you see all that big pine and cold water.
Blue
Why are so many visions of the future cast in cool tones? Blues and greys, whites and silvers.
Future
A vaguely human-shaped slab of bronze staggers into a ferocious wind, its body on fire, determined to walk.