nine percent

The sky above the city hangs low, heavy and droopy, like a damp towel forgotten under the radiator. The city's arteries are clogged with a slowly moving, smoking mass of metal. The gaze skims over faded facades, over the flashing, half-burnt cross of a pharmacy, until it finally slides down and rests on the dashboard of a car. To the dried crumb stuck in the ventilation grill. There is a disposable coffee cup next to it. The plastic cover is cracked. Brown, cooled foam slowly seeps through the microscopic slit. It slides down the paper side, leaving a sticky, drying trail.

I run my finger over that moisture. Fingertips throbbing. The same dull, monotonous rhythm that has been pounding in the cerebral cortex for the second week. Profit. Numbers. Conversions.

We are just twisted biological filters. A caecum, coughing up the universe through itself and retaining only what it desperately craves at the time. All it takes is for your woman to get pregnant, and the streets are suddenly filled with bloated bellies. They swing at the cash registers of the shopping center, at the bus stops, in the park alleys - the world becomes one swollen, full of expectation maternity. Think of buying a damn fishing rod and fishermen with rubber boots and hooks stuck in their hats will come out of every nook and cranny.

If you are hungry, there is no God. There is no cosmic harmony. There is only a greasy display case at a gas station where yesterday's sausage in batter is drying under a halogen lamp. All that infinite, multifaceted world, all that unfathomable depth in which we float dissolved like dust in the sun's rays, shrinks to a single point and disappears.

The lungs move too slowly. The air in the cabin feels too thick, like I'm trying to inhale ash. I barely got under the garbage truck yesterday. All I heard was the squeal of air brakes and the hot stench of diesel hit my face. But I was not afraid of it. My palms didn't even sweat. There was no knot in the stomach. I was calculating the margin at the time. The gain overshadowed the prospect of a ton of metal hitting my bones. The numbers sucked all the oxygen out of the street. Even the beautiful people walking down the sidewalk were just moving cost graphs.

The high beams flash behind. A muffled beep sounds.

- Are you staying here for the night or not? - shouts a man from the adjacent lane. His neck is pressed by the too-tight collar of his shirt, red veins popping out on the surface of his skin.

The hands on the steering wheel are clenched so tightly that the cogs glow in the gray.

"Nine percent," I mumble through dry lips, looking straight ahead.

A man spits through an open window. His car shoots forward with a cloud of exhaust fumes.

The brown drop mark on the cup has already dried.

Lights up green.