George Inness Delaware Water Gap

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of people, but they’re also full of commerce and shops and religions and . . . This is stupid, he told himself. They’re just things. They’re not alive.
Maybe life is something you acquire.
Parasites spirit they had.
He stood up.
‘Where’s everyone gone, Librarian?’
‘Oook oook.’
‘Just like them. I’d have done that. Rush off without thinking. May the
gods bless them and help them, ifand predators, but not like the sort affecting animals and vegetables. They were some kind of big, slower, metaphorical lifeform, living off cities. But they incubate in the cities, like those, what are they? those icky newman wasp things. He could remember now, just as he could remember everything, reading as a student about creatures that laid their eggs inside other creatures. For months after he’d refused omelettes and caviar, just in case.And the eggs would . . . look like the city, in a way, so that citizens would carry them home. Like cuckoo eggs.I wonder how many cities died in the past? Ringed by parasites, like a coral reef surrounded by starfish. They’d just become empty, they’d lose whatever