The City

      Once we were ten miles outside the city, it

      vanished completely. We suspected this

      happened from the top down, with television

      antennae fading into ether and asphalt

      shingles glimmering, like fish scales,

      then flecking into nothingness.

      For a mere

      moment buildings were reduced to rib cage,

      people illuminated within the lattice of beams,

      bent over ironing boards and countertops,

      chopping cucumbers into slender green coins

      until they and their knives and even the blade-

      scarred board had vanished into empty air.

      But there were also those who asserted

      buildings softened into something like

      sodden cardboard and settled slowly into

      themselves. One contingent even claimed

      nothing happened at all: the city simply

      shifted like a sleeping animal, dreaming

      of our return.

      We decided to confirm

      our top-down theory by hiding a camera

      in