Neon Corpse in a Narrow Throat

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The street is too narrow for breathing.

Neon drips from the signs and gathers in the gutters like chemical rain. Wires hang overhead, black veins against a pale sky. The alley trembles, not with music, but with the memory of something buried under asphalt—rice fields, bone dust, factory smoke.

An old woman turns her face toward the light. Her smile cracks open like a kiln. The wrinkles are not age; they are choreography. Each line is a river where forgotten farmers sank. She lifts her hand slowly, as if pulling it through thick mud. The gesture is incomplete. It rots mid-air.

A man in a leather jacket screams into his glowing device. The scream does not leave his mouth. It hardens there, a white insect. His jaw becomes a hinge between centuries.

Young women lean forward, backward, sideways. Their heads tilt as though listening to the soil beneath the concrete. One red hat flares like a wound. Sunglasses hide eyes that are already turned inward. Their shoulders twitch in delayed thunder. Their necks stretch, then retract, like turtles withdrawing into ancestral shells.

This is not dancing.

This is the body remembering it was once livestock.

The music fractures. A thin metallic pulse crawls along the storefronts. Fluorescent signs blink, then blink again, as if uncertain of their own existence. A shaved head pivots slowly, chin dropping toward collarbone. The spine ripples in secret increments, vertebrae awakening one by one like prisoners counting days.

Hands bloom in awkward angles. Fingers stiffen, tremble, curl. The crowd thickens but no one touches. They float beside one another like debris after a flood.

A plastic cup swings. Liquid sloshes. Someone laughs. The laugh collapses into a cough, then into silence.

The old woman leans closer to the camera. Her face expands beyond proportion. She is not smiling. She is shedding. Her skin becomes paper lantern ash. Beneath it, another face waits—pale, powdered, already half-buried.

Traffic hesitates at the mouth of the alley. Engines idle. The city pretends indifference.

But beneath the pavement, feet continue to move.

Slowly.

Relentlessly.

The street is a corpse that refuses stillness.

And in its narrow throat, the dancers sink deeper, not toward spectacle, but toward the soft, humid darkness where movement begins—before language, before neon, before names.