Cartography of Quiet Machines

The city hums like a parked train idling, light pooled in gutters, oil-slicked constellations. I walk the long avenue of vending machines, each a glass lighthouse with a slow pulse.

A moth taps at the cold pane, insistent, its wings mapped with powder and dusk. Coins clink like small decisions in my palm, I choose a soda, and the world exhales.

Behind the warehouses, the river turns steel, dragging a net of torn reflections downstream. A siren stitches the dark to the dark, and somewhere a train unspools its iron ribbon.

I think of the hands that filled these shelves, of cables beneath the sidewalk, dreaming of current. Night is a factory, but gentle, and I am inventory, moving through its aisles.