When the sky claps angrily, suddenly—should we heed? Or say, ten minutes, enough time to wander from home zuruck to my kitchen window crunched underfoot a storm just passed leaving diamond splinters to defy a callused frontier. My window frame swung and caught nothing missing my resignation, or any further toil at invisibles, remaining there—heavily—like the mind as public space, yet we’re told humans are a danger to themselves. Who? Me? Man chuckled
at the end of the line 
            ‘Excuse me, what is funny?’ I asked Man.
            ‘Your insurance does not cover accidents 

I mean

those accidents,’ Man said.
            ‘Those?’ I probed, unthinkingly. 
            ‘Those… of a natural occurrence,’ 
he underwrote.
            ‘What? Why not?’ I asked, ‘and…and why is this funny to you? Can, can you hear me?’ 
            ‘Nothing is funny,’ replied Man. ‘We have no control

over the natural world—Our executive premium could, perhaps.’ I paraphrase, his delivery more staccato where thought patterns barely recognised a flatline recording, my reception crunched and compressed, at the time I cursed a future under an angry sky. Glass in my shoe where I sat by the road aside a ditch a short distance away lay Man, thigh bone jutting through his jeans like splinters of glass, I was told. I couldn’t look nor see his pain, but felt his regret drying in my throat—I shivered, staring involuntarily into space where damage received language from an earth turning approximately one thousand miles every hour. How so, shards of bone pointing skywards—two rhomboidal megaliths of optimism’s past—a Soviet monument. I sometimes think about Man. Our accident, a natural occurrence, a heedless rush of blood down Camargue Country Road past salt flats and wild white horses, dark specks dusting their noses in duels near colosseums, where visitors held forth hopeful cameras willing whispers past onto film before speed cameras laid a queue trailing single file. Crust-cornered eyes rushed but aware I waved five hundred metres of notice, slowing us to a procession of hearses lumbering cargo coastward trailing me inching out five hundred metres of orange blinks and a pause. A regrettable impulse, an engine whirr, a hurried motorcycle how blistering, slowing traffic and a turning earth hurtling south, look! Marseille and the Mediterranean Sea. Instead, recoil, at my driver-side window shattering a blur of a bullet into the ditch neighbouring an old stone wall left by rapacious Romans, which fate had Man miss—the ditch, opened a ready-made grave; fuck. I shook softened safety shards from my shirt onto my belly composite safety composite lucidity a brand-new machine on its maiden voyage left me no scar but Man’s thigh bones scraping at my thoughts reaching through the earth, intent left in pieces of a past. I think Man never really left that ditch. Regret lay rotting watching them haul his body into an ambulance. Regret lingered greeting worms and country mice wandering his bloody face, the forked tongue of fate tutting forever disdain at Man’s crippled leg dragging along behind him while back at the shop, machine cosmetically touched up, composite metals curled under heat from hell restoring form: insurances
paid in advance.

 

Michael Salu is a British-born Nigerian writer, artist, scholar, editor and creative strategist with a strongly interdisciplinary practice. His written work has appeared in literary journals, magazines, art and academic publications, and as an artist, he has exhibited internationally. He runs House of Thought, an artistic research practice and consultancy focusing on bridging creative, critical thinking and technology and is part of Planetary Portals, a research collective. Red Earth, his first book, is forthcoming from Calamari Archive in 2023.