Slices of May

Strange, warbling horns radiate up from the streets. Children's voices, drunken shouts, somehow rise fifteen stories to be heard. A man on a loudspeaker in the intersection below talks from morning till night. Inside, delivery men call out, and electronic locks chime arrogantly, while someone practices piano upstairs. Megaphone trucks overpower them all, blasting incessant messages while they cruise around the apartment complex, their foreign words penetrating two panes of glass to fill every room. A crude digital chime indicates some sort of mandatory message is about to be broadcast into every apartment. Listen up! A cluster of helicopters fly overhead. There is no escape from noise here.

Everything fades away five minutes over the river. In an improbably short distance, all sound is reduced to a chorus of croaking frogs and an intermittent breeze. Freshly planted rice fields extend outwards from a narrow road, raised up from the flooded mud. This is the realm of the amphibian. The frog sounds are all-encompassing, broken only by the odd dog bark, muffled—almost—by so many amphibious throats.

A crane stalks the shallows of the river, easing its reed-like legs into the current, tilting a black knife beak towards some unseen prey.