Dtroy - Terra Incognita (2018)

Someone had hung caution tape around the parameter of the city or cities, as it were. Four cities in each quadrant of the earth and, beyond that tape, nothing. There were few that, beneath the cloak of darkness, had begun to slither under the tape, careful not to disturb it — crossing had been strictly forbidden — and push the limitations they had been both subjected and grown accustomed to.

The first breath on the other side was always the hardest, cold air freezing in bronchial tubes, blood cells turning to ice, but walking warmed the body and soon circulation would continue in rhythm to the pulsating earth. In the cities, everything stayed quite still, but here, out here in the dark, the ground trembled with life as tangles of wires and cables erupted from cracked soil, sparks erupting from the stripped ends.

We were only explorers with differing incentives. Three young women attempted to connect the disconnected, hoping to build homes out beneath the stars. Some wanted to harness the vibrations of it all. Some pressed their ears down and murmured. Terra. Terra. Terra. They wept in fresh air and moved in time to the gusts of wind that the buildings of the cities blocked. Some had never experienced raised goose bumps brought on by a chill or the quick shudder of a spine when one shivers.

But they felt it now, a collective movement, filling our fists with remnants of jagged metal, laying wire far out into what we believed to be infinite land.

When storms came, we danced with the whips of lightning and convulsed to the damning thunder.