OiL.

Maintenance Account in the Most Inferior Ventricle XIII, Sections 2.a and 2.c

January, 1032 A.U.

Chicago, Illinois

“Unity is a funny thing. You shouldn’t get too hung up on it.”

Inside an astrocyte deep under the surface of Chicago, a maintenance man named Abir

sat back and looked at Clancy with his shy eyes. The light was low, and the colour of lymph and

blood. Between them smoke curled in musky obscurity, wafting in gauzy exhalations from the

hookah on the low table, and at sage intervals, from fine pores in the walls.

“I don’t know what it is, Clancy,” Abir said, and the shy crinkles beside his shy eyes asked the

question crouching in his throat. “The growing thing.”

Scritty trickles dribbled drab from the spout of the alabaster tub at the edge of the small

room, dragging dredges drowsy through crooked copper pipes. There was a coloured window

across from the giant face growing out of the wall; a stained-glass mosaic of the Chicago Glial

Department crest. Underneath, the letters ‘B.B.B.’ were embossed in a subtle brass, half

occluded by a fluted ceramic vase holding sleepy yellow camelias.

“Unity?” Clancy sighed expansively, and the walls, which were of course the partitions of his

own innards, fluttered gently. “Well, I suppose it is everything, my friend.”

“Not unity. The other thing, the thing that’s growing down there,” Abir insisted.

“Which other thing ?” Clancy said, laughing with compassion and without sound.

“The other.”

Though they were deep, at least a kilometer from the uppermost skin of the city, Clancy

was nonetheless an epithelial cell – more measured than his subcutaneous cousins, yet every bit

as ready to strangle Abir, reduce his strange, wiry body to its constituent elements, and digest

him. Outside of his jurisdiction, the maintenance man had no titles and no right, and acted

accordingly.

“How do you know it?” Clancy asked.

There had been a work order from the Maintenance Authority. A boy-friend in Lincoln

Park had lured him up to the stratum corneum with pretty slim cigarettes and amphetamine

© Matthew Fudge, September 2nd 2025 for OIL MAG