At number
eighty-nine, Little Red Riding Hood has taken off all his clothes. Selfies will
shortly appear somewhere to prove this fact. Little Red Riding Hood is going on
a date.
The screen I gaze into is vantablack. Something smells of a shadow. Something tells me she has black earth under her fingernails. Black earth from The Dark Garden. Something in me feels her black familiar arch its back invisible in its dusty tantalum night-time. I imagine it hisses at me out of somewhere. The hairs on my arms stand on end. Something tells me the cat yawns.
The algorithms are not overworked. They are dressed to kill. They have a date. They are going to the carnival.
In the Congo, in
Brazil, black men slave for coltan.
The photograph “The Writer at Langaller Lane 172988” © David F. Brandon 2017
