City Of The Soon To Be Dead

This city was once a beautiful one. In its main square people gathered and sang and danced and ate together. People made friends, memories, love, and then children. But today it has lost its liveliness because of too much life. The city has become too crowded. With so many people sharing so little space the people have become suicidal. The group survival mechanism in each individual's brain has been switched on. The socially disconnected and emotionally weak are eliminating themselves.

Some have moved from the city and built their homes on the hilltop. The first inhabitants of the hilltop were quite comfortable and happy but soon the hill became crowded too.

The great trees once so visible in the skyline whose dew covered leaves were once the source of water for the city have died. Their withered branches and crusted bark no longer give life but seem to draw any life from the surrounding soil and keep it hidden in secret compartments in their trunks.

The women of the city no longer have children and the few that do are forced to raise them without the help of their neighbors. While the women are still pretty they are no longer beautiful. The current circumstance makes living selfishly the easiest path and selfish living has dulled their natural charms. Most spend their time grooming for a special event which never arrives. Nearly all their smiles are false ones.

The men roam the streets like lone wolfs. Frustrated by their own uselessness. Some escape to the countryside. Some escape into their own imaginations in the bars and casinos that now line the main thoroughfare. Men forced to compete with thousands of other depressed and wandering men for the hearts of the city's fickle and directionless women have sex only to momentarily kill their desire for a woman in each of their pasts. A woman who they imagine, wrongly, to be free of the emotional disease which has infected all the others.

The local government has adopted and enforces a secret policy it uses to keep the populace sedentary and sexless in order to keep consumption of natural resources low. Now people line up in the square and stare up at the night sky with telescope glasses. They stare at the surface of the moon and mars through the lenses and imagine gathering and singing and dancing and eating on those barren landscapes.