Originally posted at Posthuman Blues

The aerostats hovered over the horizon as we made our way through the wastes. Their lights, already tenuous, played weakly across the ground, accentuating the heaped ash and leaving curved rungs of light dangling in my vision like baubles. I'd never adapted to the aerostats' presence. Even their shape seemed implacably wrong, as if they'd been snatched from some higher dimensional space and squeezed until they fit the contours of the known. As they moved they stirred up vast clouds of black dust that occluded the stars.

I mopped sweat from my brow with a peeling concert T-shirt and took a sip of ancient Gatorade from one of the bottles we'd taken from a convenience store somewhere outside St. Louis.