Air Review - "America's Son"

The statue talked. It looked at me and said: "I've cut the world." It was a parkette, a measly patch of grey-tipped grass on Severin and Kiln, that had a little gravel-bed bench, a few unwild flowers, leant like tired mannequins, and this statue. Sir Morgan Plank, Count of Regent Grand and its surrounding territories. All it said beneath his name and station was a one-line description of his life: "responsible for the swimsuit and the plea bargain". The swimsuit and the plea bargain. I read this and wondered which came first. But as I sat with my egg salad and salt drink, on lunch from my occupational happenstance some would call a 'job', I looked up at the patch of sky left kindly by the scrapers and thought about if I sat here all my life, like this grey-tipped grass and these blue-eyed flowers, if I would last longer than a couple of weeks. And then it spoke. "I've cut the world," it said, clear as the bell in the unseen church that rang at 4 each day. The pigeons all looked in unison. I stared blankly at the face of Sir Morgan Plank, creator of trunks and ratting out your friends, with his concave pupils and his raised right hand, and said, "Pardon?" but of course he didn't reply. I took it as a sort of apology. How lucky, I though, this ghost. At least he has an outlet. [site]

(abandoned WWII fort via Photography served)