Starbursts, the kinds of colors you see out in space. Big, cartoonish proportions, horribly twisted and squished in all the bright colors of Tokyo neon lights, perfectly clean and sharp. Those train cars are plastered with their work. You can see them at midnight, walking on the other side of the guardrail: pilgrims, knights, and small gods. When the taggers hit rails near a highway, they’re looking at a lot of walking, this time getting their backs lit up by headlights. They’re twenty feet away from the road, and there’s no shoulder to pull your car off. The open rails near the highway are even tougher. The taggers probably have a plastic Safeway bag full of spray cans with them, clinking and tinkling with ball bearings, and someone’s got to figure out how to get the cans inside without making a lot of noise. You throw the carpets over the top of the fences so the barbed wire digs into that rubber, and that holds it in place while you climb over the top. You buy the carpets at a thrift store or pick them up off the curb, and you make sure they have the rubber on the bottom. That means the taggers were out at one a.m., carrying carpets. You have to understand that rail yards are surrounded by barbed-wire fences. Who would have thought? Gods speak on old train cars.

Sitting on the rails for days and weeks, those great, glorious train cars. It’s brilliant-God’s always hiding in nautilus shells, why not BNSF? Northern Pacific Railway! Which way to Zion? Follow the railroad! The big, red, rusted rails! Trains, graffiti, and gods were all themes of the project I worked on last year for the Twitter Fiction Festival, The Rats in The Walls. Thinking about graffiti shaped how I think about art, and about what it means to be famous. It began when I was back in Washington State, watching the graffiti on freight trains and wondering who made them. The following is a short essay I wrote about graffiti.

Rat in the wall lovecraft