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A steep descent, as of fireflies. The lights may be fluorescent, but the smell is dark anyway – of coal and metal. Everything about it is adventurous even though it’s an everyday sort of thing – ordinary as fireflies on August nights, but a sudden stumble, or push and you’d be dead beyond the yellow line. Underground the lights seem drab; the grime more pronounced, alive, ominous, the crowd - urgent. Rushed. Standing though, still as fireflies at dawn. In the corner a guitar moans, starving. Like the rats in the rails. There’s still a passing glow, a touch of daydream to it all, anyway. Hurtling from the shadows, a train’s headlights are an explosion of fireflies wrested from the summer grass. Perhaps this is where they come for the winter, all ethereal floating tendencies, gone: turned into a shrieking, powerful thing. Still, as transitory as they were in summer, these new fireflies. As the people waiting are. All except for the man in the corner with his guitar shaped like famine – There are fireflies in his eyes, and – among the dollar bills crumpled like moth wings in his hat, there are still more fireflies. |