gistfile1.txt

It was a clear day, before the rain would come, and it was though a lake, from a pale morning, had been inverted upon the sky.

One, two, three, four. I must sleep. There is a road, and on it the people, hundreds of them, walking through the afternoon and the evening until it is night. One, two, three …

Beneath this, down a hill, ran a road of houses. It was an ochre mid-afternoon, in April, and a man without purpose wandered down it, staring at what was before him but only seeing a field of wheat in the summer, beyond which were further hills of wheat, and the sun above them, suspended in the crystal silence of trapped memory or light.

The sky fell into an ocean, which ran darkly into Port Philip, and spilled out to become the nighttime circle of the city’s map; from above it was cold and the lights of the houses were pinpricks in the darkness.

Huddled upon a pedestrian seat, by one of the bays, beneath a palm tree, was a figure, sexless, its arms wrapped about itself, shuddering. It thought nothing, but its feelings thrummed into an articulation that the winding paths through the dockside park, and the roads past it, and the sleeping houses of the suburbs above the road, were not adequate for the expression of what it was. The figure stirred and ached and the

And once there was only white, only the clouds, or what a cloud might resemble; you see a cloud once or twice or three times in your life …