Indices Indicate (Late Early January)

In the month of rain and heat retained in mountain springs, we celebrate our economic system and the diverse mobile food delivery options it enables.

Morning lies resplendent in the cold gray dishwater. The totality of household spoons must be fetched from the depths. A living film coats gloveless hands, flavor crystals dissolved in solution, a primordial umami. The clogged pipes will have to wait for an abstract but hopefully not all that distant future. Meanwhile, the chief executive ambles across a frost strewn field, cognizant, in a fashion, of the demands placed on the citizenry, of which he is first among equals. Squinting into middle distance, he congratulates his administration regarding various economic indices. Rent is on the increase once more. A crumpled letter falls through the mail slot. The maintenance man, his existence conjectural, demands a greater share, so the landlord says, a greater share of funds that would normally ultimately go into tropical paragliding excursions, into the buying of escorts. We are all going through the crisis together, but that will be soon behind us, soon enough, as indices indicate. Having delivered his statement, the chief executive ambles away. As morning advances into night, as the security detail motors away to the next regional midsized city, phosphorescent spoor begins to phosphoresce along the trampled grass, imprint tracing various paths, bifurcations, their vagaries beautiful to comprehend, in retrospect, when we all have become fractionally richer.