Moon at Half Past Noon

The air breathes of grease and the bitter chicory.
We sit on the ledge where the balcony stood,
We pass the dark bottle, we strike the slow match,
Waiting for the server to clear, or the map to reset.

Six years of dust, or maybe but seven,
Skin the dark color of the river’s silt.
His dog is a cage of mangy ribs,
Glitching a hoarse ache into the ridge.

In the black crosshairs, the boy is an insect,
A low-res render rendering spite.
He screams heavy words for his milk-teeth,
Spitting out curses stolen from the dead.
We laugh in our cuffs—it is comedy, truly—
This David of pebbles defying the UI.

But the glass of the scope is a terrible trick.
If I drop the black barrel three fingers of breadth,
I look on the door of the bakery cellar,
Where we watched them buy bread with its crown of seed—
Back when the mornings rose up in the fog,
Before we dialed the coordinates in.
We used to track figs at the man’s broken awning,
Purple and bursting like hearts in the palm;
We watched them drink tea in the square of the fountain,
When the stone still wept water—not blood, not lime,
Not the gray, blowing powder of crushed-up bone.

We knew the beat of those shutters at dawn.
We knew the girl with the yarn in her hair.
Now there are no shutters. Now there is no hair.
The match objective is met. The territory is cleared.
We flayed the skin from the valley to the bone,
And now we are spawned in the skeleton.

I am lost in the fog of the bakery door—
But the turret gives a sharp, haptic click.

“Look at the boy,” says my partner, his breath thick with rum,
“The bastard believes he is part of the simulation.”
I open my mouth to tell him to wait,
To tell him the figs were sweet in the square—

“Let us give him his medal of lead.”

The stone leaves the hand in a harmless arc—
The rifle speaks out, and the afternoon shatters.

The stone falls short.
The boy falls shorter.

The dog does not run, the dog only sits,
And pours out a sound that is not a dog’s sound—
A high-frequency feedback that rips through the wool,
Straight through the sandbags, straight into the meat of the ear.

I turn to speak, to call for the exit,
But my partner has dropped his fire.
It burns a red hole in the cloth of his knee.
His eyes are wide glass, fixed on the red dirt below.
The UI has vanished. The controls do not respond.
He wills his hand to rise, but the hand is dead on his thigh,
He wills his legs to stand, but the boundary is locked.
The game is over, the lobby is dead,
And we are still trapped inside the rubble.