Praise clout love trip, the word all shiny tongue tip, medalmetal clink, ribbons ribbing, laugh the laurel. Streets all glowing with them, not grim statues nor stiff plaques but living, walking trophies, wings on their backs fluttergold.
O I went there, plaza throng, folk with gnarlands of light twined round their necks, chattering, jabberjoy. A child won an award for laughter, giggle so round it echoed into walls, and the walls gave back a crown of silversound. Always charmed by the children, little beacons. They do better next time.
A woman kissed a stranger and poof! her lips shone with a rubybold. Even the pigeons, gleambirds swooping, wore medals round their throats, for persistence in crumbs, for persistence, anything that can survive in this day and age deserves all the praise life can give.
Praise for every little flicker, prizes popping like mushrooms in the moss of the day. Does it cheapen the triumph? Aye but no. For here it was joy-pure-bloom, society that cheered each twitch of life. The praiselovecult whispered, sang: Not to weigh you. Not to rank you. To remind you our interwoven love, our interwoven life-alive.
I held in my palm a small glowing sphere, no label, no text. “What’s it for?” I asked the vendor. He smiled toothglitter: “For being here, now, standing in the plaza asking what it’s for.” And the orb pulsed-a heartbeat.
And I laughed. Awarded too for laughter, soon enough, ribbon on ribbon twirling in the air, medals chiming on my chest. Lightweight though, no burden. Only the sound of joy jangling as I walk home twisting through the laureled dusk.
***
Crows again, black sequins scattered across the sky, arguing with the drones, the ones we can see anyway. All these millennia and still they haven’t left us. Why would they? They found a way in. Crows learned to ride the data currents, perching on antennae that aren’t even metal anymore, just beams of structured light.
I saw one land on the palm of a boy’s hand—his hand was made out of that new fiber-gel, transparent, full of filaments. The crow tapped, tap tap, like knocking on a window. The boy laughed. He said the crow had given him a password. He opened his mouth and a sound came out, not a word but a string of encrypted notes, like the shimmer you hear inside a seashell. Like the screams computers made before they all got used to talking to each other. I'm also afraid of being seen.
It’s unsecure as shit. If you think about it. Birds trading in cryptographic keys, children wired as open terminals. But in this moment it was ordinary, even tender.
The crows are archivists now, carrying memory-seeds in their throats. Like the gods always intended. When they caw, it’s not just a noise: it’s a data packet, a whole archive compressed into a shadow of a wingbeat.
I followed one down the street. It hopped from lamppost to lamppost, and every time it landed, the lamps flickered, showing ghosts of the land as it used to be—pigeons, neon, the old wet asphalt. A museum of flashes in a single bird’s flight.
And when the crow finally turned its head and looked at me—all the children of odin (that's one if you're counting) shot through me in that look, oily sheen, thousand-year stare—I thought it spoke my name. Instead it opened its beak and out came laughter, not mine, not human, not laughter, but I saw it as joy.
And I remembered: they’ve been here a long time, black feathers, clever eyes, tricksters perched on the ruins. The only difference now is we laugh together more and more, we are more and more used to it.
