edges more poorly defined. There was a kind of beauty to it, in a macabre way. The voxsola blanketed the city like a covering of dust, a falling of snow. Delicate gossamer strings poured out of the windows of disused high rises, sprawled across the dead screens of TV billboards, fringed streetlamps like fractals of frost. The fibres of the web glistened in the darkness, dripped slowly and quietly in the night. It reminded Sylvia of her beetles. Though they were long dead, carefully preserved, they retained their natural beauty. So it was with the remnants of Yrcalla’ s electric heart.
Sylvia felt a shiver run through her. She looked up and down the street, but no one was following her. Just nerves. Still her fingers fumbled as she opened the rusty door to the bike shed, unlocked the chain around her bike and carefully rode it home.
That night, Sylvia dreamt of the characters in Shelley’ s poem again. Demogorgon was holding Prometheus pinned against the rock. Silken tendrils of fungus emerged from a nearby plug socket to wrap around Prometheus’ s muscular torso, limned his well-defined abs, pushed their way into the scar on his side where the eagle had eaten his liver. Asia, Panthea and Ione sat by and watched, their gowns riding up while their hands rode down. Prometheus screamed.
*
Summer in Yrcalla, and Sylvia was on the telephone to her Grandmother.“ I’ m sorry, I don’ t think I’ m going to be able to travel down next weekend after all.”
She felt guilty. Her grandmother had been looking forward to her visit. She tried to visit her grandmother once every month these days, but she had missed the last visit as well. She had been too busy with the new job, learning the demands of her new role,
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