A few months back I posted an open invitation on the blog to submit short fiction pieces that were inspired in some way by T.S. Eliot's poem, "Preludes." Here are the two pieces that emerged! it’s fucking quiet out, the quiet like crisscrossing sirens and mangy dogs, and it’s like he’s not even there but she shudders and stares at the ground, the white stripe of the rebel bicycle rejecting its load of toxic plastic primer imprinted on salt-crusted suede, shuttered murals, abstract impressions on concrete of oxygen and the musty freshness of a coastal rainshadow and that tucked clock fitting experience and breathlessness into the delicious agony of time and the mural is green with lots of blue like magenta-dense filters and abandoned menthol cigarettes and that bicycle under the rattling tracks floating on air is escaping, a vandal bringing the streets inside, glowing white primer on ancient filthy concrete or at least microscopic infinity compressed into litter-strewn