Their eyes caught Fabulosa’s –– eyes no different than hers, their eyes and their worries –– sentient minds sans all the clutter and pretense and intellectual drapery that rattled round the human gourd.
Fabulosa felt their bone-deep, world-weary ache, their paralytic fear, though they had no way to articulate it to a people who had lost their capacity to listen. An automated wrangler –– one of last year’s models –– prodded the edibles forward despite their protestations, despite their fright frozen limbs, via a herky-jerky articulated appendage of barbed, electrified stingers.
Fabulosa scanned the crowd for station agents. She scrambled down from the platform edge, almost breaking her neck as she freefell among them. She shook out the pain of her twisted ankle.
She limped under, over, in-between the edibles, until she came to one of the jigsaw seams that kept the collapsible maze together. She pushed, and watched the wall hinge open. Edibles scattered. She wasn’t quite sure where they could go, but she wasn’t quite sure where she might go, either.
A New Jersey native, James Edward O’Brien currently resides in Queens, NY in the US with his wife and three rescue dogs. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in The Literary Hatchet, Eye to the Telescope, and Spunk: Art & Perspectives. Follow Jim on Twitter @UnagiYojimbo.