Purple Fog Bellies
I climbed the rolling oak hills of the East Bay, chasing the sun’s final rays as the horizon bled from orange to blue to black. Ever upward into the abandoned hills, the fog from the west had already swallowed San Francisco and had begun to stumble over the eastern peaks. Before the twilight came to a close, the fog, a colossal single moving cloud ten times the size of the city, glowed purple in the narrow band between building tops and fog bottoms.
In the black hills, the only light beamed in a cone full of illuminated moisture from my solitary headlight. In the rare glimpses below to the flats, the city’s beaded orange streetlights twinkled like pinholes in the earth’s surface, revealing the hot turbulence below the soil.
Curving left to right, and east to west on the descending road in the hills, my fingers grew numb and my eyes watered in the rushing wind. For miles, gravity pulled me downward, steadily speeding through the blurred surroundings while my posture froze in cold ecstasy. I was in the grey, the nothing, the timeless. I was leaning over the western edge. Coasting only forward in the wide, blank dusk.
DSJ
