Visible City

I've got to stop starting all my sentences thusly: "In America..."

This post isn't about America.

Flies sit on the rubbish bin lid. It's as close as they'll get to the dead rat inside. They just want to get up close and personal to that festering piece of festiness and delight in it and revel in it and multiply its festiness. In every nook and cranny in the city; at the roots of the long grass by the back fence, in the rivulets and the storm drains, behind the boxes and bins in the alley ways, beneath the foundations of the city - there lurks the festiness, you can't find it, you can't eradicate it. The city is built on festering dead rats.

In another city, the people breath in ennui. They all suffer from the airbourne plague, but there is no solidarity; each person is numb to the other. If this was Hamlin, would they care about the rats? If a dead rat rose to the surface of the visible city, in her bed, between her sheets, would she detest it?

Maybe she would. The inhabitants of anti-Hamlin need to see their rats.