Free City of Singles by Jason Bryan

Somewhere inside my head Russel Peters cracks off an Asian driver joke. A break in traffic and we rocket down Powell Street, sending spray towards a group of people smoking outside the Sally Ann. I laugh when I shouldn’t. I laugh at that too.
    Passing the police station in the heart of the ghetto; so Vancouver. Cruising by huddled bus stop figures and my eyes catch a glimpse of a couple holding hands. I don’t like to think about love. Every social contract, every belief system, everything I have been taught to believe growing up is a lie. From Santa to Jesus, all lies. The wars on drugs and terror seem like some macabre theatre of death with no story, no point, and no chance at victory. It is as futile as a war on sex would be. Politics, gender roles, right and wrong, good and bad, all seemed so easy to know when growing up, now living in a world as ambiguous as my beliefs.
    The last bastion of my faith is my foolish belief in quasi-meaningful love. Another empty institution built up by idealists, not realists. I’m quickly seeing the concept of love being just as flawed as a belief that prayer can help. Cupid shoots heart-shaped hollow points that do no good for anyone. I wanted to hold on to some ideals, traditions, and the idea of romance. They all seem like part of a dying system and forgotten virtues. Now I think that love is the only thing that can cure me of this cancer of apathy. I used to feel that conservatism was the wiser choice, now I realize it’s a lost cause.
    My values are nearly nonexistent, as are my allegiances to any group or community. I’m the perfect globalist individual, I know my rights in the charter. I’d be completely free if it weren’t for the shallow faith that I will find love as intense as the last time. My back grows heavy with such a pack of monkeys on it; love, liquor, money, drugs and pussy. That haunting thought that I might not have to settle is sometimes the only thing that this engine runs on anymore. I think of the world and all of its problems, the grim outlook on debt, austerity, social ills and skyrocketing costs of living.
    A never ending blanket of soot-black cloud swirls around the earth. The planet looks like a nightmare. I grab the moon in one godlike palm. Cold burns my skin, popping and sizzling the way a doctor freezes off a wart. Squeezing it hard and pulverizing it, it pops and crumbles in my clasped hands. A fine crystalline powder slips through my fingers, white dust lazily swirls around the night side of earth. Now reaching out and cupping both hands around the sun to extinguish the flames. The sun refuses to die easily, flames shoot and spit with fury from between my fingers. Embers and jets of smoke rush into my face, only deepening my resolve to smother it. An eddy of dying fire twists and curls around my wrist, the inferno bleeding itself out. I feel the life of the sun fade, the fire and smoke sputters and only a dull orange glow leaks between my tightly held hands. I release it from my death grip, the ashen ball almost looks sad. It cracks and begins to shudder, collapsing in on itself and becoming a tiny black hole. I look back at the lonely darkened sphere of dirt and water, the only place we all call home. One single point of light on the west coast glows as my mind’s eye zooms in towards the dim beacon. Closer, closer and even closer still as the picture becomes clearer from the eternal midnight that engulfs the rest of the planet. I see the amber light of a bedside table glow from a bedroom window. I see myself in bed, smiling, kissing a woman who radiates happiness. I guess the romantic soul left in me really still believes. The world could end and I would think everything was OK, because we had each other.
    I daydreamed most of the drive again. It’s 3:55 when I make it to the bank. The cost of the cab fare ends the pregnancy of my wallet as the cash vagina births a wrinkled twenty, curling to return to straw shape. My change is a whole two