a story about cities in bottles!

Remember before artistic biology, when dads still kept exacting scale replicas of major cities in bottles around the house? McWain’s prized Berlin was just all that guy could talk about after his fourth fifth, so after he left Jamie heaved it out of the cask and threw it across the room. An Avis Teagle, its perfect world was suspended in an amber bottle made of asteroid crystal. so of course when it hit the fireplace the thing fucking exploded into a million pieces and a thousand firework sparks.

We put out spot fires and vacuumed and depolarized the couch and curtains, but we also sighed and understood that the ecosystem of our home was just invisibly soaked with the wreckage of a German capitol drawn for mice smaller than ants. We'd go months between sightings, but it was always a shock to find bits in our hair and in our ears and on our toothbrushes. Staring long into his wife’s eyes, Darryl noticed a gritty mote of six blocks of parkland and two office buildings. After putting the kids down for the night, Earnestine found a hair-wide half-mile of residential train track sticking out of a half-eaten ball of play-doh. One time Earl unmistakably sneezed an airport against the inside front of his motorcycle helmet.

three major universities

The biggest intact piece was a parking lot flake blown out of the air conditioner, half a centimetre in length and rendered with thousands of parked car facsimiles packed perfectly in rows. Taped to newspaper and studied by magnifying glass, the unanimous verdict was we'd scrape it like a matchbook. Later on I licked my nails and watched my tongue for gridlock. ¶ "Roxie, come over here and have a look at this! Here, in my Hawaiian Punch! That speck. No, don’t pick at it, just look real closely. You remember, right? Just let your eyes adjust and really focus. See it? I looked it up just now, it’s the Alexanderplatz, half the Fernsehturm and six blocks of Grunerstrasse. I coulda just drank that!"