a

In our land the crescent of the day moon hangs like a boomerang in the clear afternoon sky…
	From afar, it is all one sees.
	And suddenly, a distant traveler realizes what haze, what was the blue shadow on the underbelly of the day moon. The skyscrapers stand stacked in the distance.
	Up close, the skyscrapers are barely visible, even as their height issues violence to one’s sight. Though, now, our mother has opened her apartment window.
	Everyone else is asleep in the city, but our mother wakes up and looks at us, drooping her arms over the windowsill, lazy and loose in her summer bedclothes.
	The sky, lifted up by its panel, suddenly distorts the rest of the structure, showing a dark space and our mother’s leaning figure, which is slanted; we realize that the skyscraper is on uneven ground, and that we have been walking faster and easier than should be.
	A disalignment is sent through the system, and every other panel, their limits and frames now discerned, reorient into a slant, as if a puzzle had been unsolved.
	The charade is up. Other people in the city wake up from their afternoon naps. My little brother Tomo and I are no longer the only ones on the streets. A vendor nearby…
	Thus, the tower in front of our skyscraper, whose back it has been reflecting perfectly thus far, seems to shimmer in the air. Rather than drift off its mirrored panels as a child shimmying off a dress, many windows open up like flaps to let out the cool inside air…
	So, a bit tattered, the structures of the other skyscrapers begin to become visible, ceasing their afternoon chameleon status, which is undertaken to ensure a nap time so that people cannot wander the streets without getting lost, and practice rest.
	Its concrete tan structure, each with a dark window, is immense, a single thing standing in the sky. On the previous skyscraper, ours, it reflects its change, showing up as a distorted self. So that, like a tan image present in a thousand panels of blue, the vast body of the blue skyscraper changes color, is smeared with concrete tan…
	We walk beneath them, still going downhill. The afternoon is coming on and the skyscrapers are reverting to normal. One by one, their scales of sky fall off, and a normal city is revealed beneath.
	But just for one moment – for I stare as I walk – that concrete tan seems to swim a path of panels, full of shadows, as if, when I took a step to the left, each color of tan slooped into the next border, filling its edges out in a soft, obsequious fashion. Reappearing in the adjacent panel, along with a host of tan, it is like a shadow of concrete is yet being turned on-and-off on the various panels.
	When I stop, as around the city the mirrors begin to be reabsorbed, the concrete reflection stays still; but as soon as I take a step, holding onto my brother’s hand, such a mobile swimming fragmentation rings my head with the most terrific mental revelation…
	Every afternoon I see such a mental picture, and hear in my mind the spangles of metal-disks shimmering with sound in a tambourine.
	During this time, also, we once went up an abandoned concrete skyscraper during the sundown, where the shadows becomes stark on the tan structures.
	Stopping in an abandoned apartment whose doorways let out into the violent open air, we would walk and now and then, taking a glance, as if an arrow had been shot through, the doorways would align.
	There would be framed, deepening it, the distant lavender shadows and haze of the city, in the evening air…