Samuel Delany

have met any number of collectors during my thirty years in the antique trade: greedy ones

She gives me a dirty look and flounces off.

And I think, they didn’t come here with any firepower to blow us all to smithereens.

I’d of squashed him flat

dusting his hands together

The lamppost jutted up against the sky—the post and the bundle swinging from it.

Through a blur he saw rows of faces, curious, concerned, anxious.

Cold night wind blew around him and he shuddered.

Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof.

Sliding through this slit, this break in the shell of the universe