AREA ZONE

In summer, I watch the asphalt sparkle, and feel it like a buzz over my skin, hear it like the hiss of many insects. At night, in the rundown park where the lamps are dim, I rake my eyes across the sky, and feel the deep ring of a bell whenever I hit a star. Glitter, shimmer, glow. A pile of sequins overwhelms me, like someone is dropping armfuls of windchimes down a staircase, each saccade a beam bounced through a mirrormaze xylophone. The symmetry of scales is calming—my eyes slide over them and I register only a quieting pulse. Glisten. Dew-dropped moss sings softly, vibrates faintly when the light judders. Some glitzy crystals hang in the window and blink rainbows at me, laughter rising and falling. The constant gleam of a marble is profoundly distinct from blocky geode light, polygon facets each a descending note on the marimba. Different still the glimmer-haze of mirages, that deep static drone fizz of soda and tremors. Gold leaf chirps, glossy ribbon hums, and from the pixelated twinkle of some video game comes the world’s sweetest knell.

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Glitter is where the darkness seeps in, where you see most clearly the contrast between light and unlight. It’s noise and corruption (it’s tiny swords glinting). Sunbeams are a language, turning motes of dust to blazing firebugs. Shadows are a language and inside them sparkles become flickering beacons: elevation of the miniature. You feel still but the universe shimmers, because it is moving.

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Glitter and static have something in common, though beyond the superficial I can’t place what. We could call them shadowholes. We’re evolving eyes to identify new effervescence fauna.