YOU’RE A FISH, YOU BREATHE OIL

You should be living in a cave, picking berries; instead you’re 

driving through a downpour—jeans dry, perm windless—faster than muscles can twitch, carried by explosions you can’t hear while walled into a neat file of cars by blocks of sky-eating concrete. Your minus-strength eyes numb to the pink, blinking billboards: mass shootings and shoe sales. 

A disembodied voice, thick as honey in your ear, dissects constructivism and transhumanism and other isms, none of which are eatable, or even breathable. In your lap, a modern limb of wire-veins and aluminum-bones provides a bird’s (or God’s?) view of the city, streets red with traffic—oncoming, oncoming. There was never a time when you might make it. 

*

Helena Olufsen is a Danish writer and a medical student at the University of Copenhagen. Her writing has previously appeared in Southern Humanities Review and Writer’s Block Magazine, and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and Neon Magazine. Her story “Tablet Lullabies” was nominated for “Best of the Net 2021.”