It would have been a quiet, tedious and safe neighbourhood, in time perhaps even appropriately populated with children, had it not been for the dead things on Tuesdays.
To no avail were the patrols of the good citizens of the suburbs, or the cameras scattered along all the streets, in the porches of the terraced houses, in front of the garages. Every Tuesday morning the carcasses were there, already smelly, immune to identification, certainly bulky. Disposing of them became a problem. The garbage collectors couldn't take care of them, they had to be broken up first and it wasn't in their job duty. At first the fire brigade took care of it, then an old ex-fisherman from the area, who in the hybrid masses perhaps saw echoes of another life of the ocean (which was as distant from the neighbourhood as a waking dream memory).
"I could say they're cetaceans," said the old man without the sea, "if it weren't that they might as well be big cans of crumpled aluminium."
The phenomenon continued. There was no Charles Fort to appreciate it, or document it, and people grew tired. Even the unknown tires. The old fisherman stopped slaughtering the monsters, no one took charge of the disposal, Tuesdays piled up and the stench of decay obliterated the scent of manicured hedges and spring flowers. More was thrown up than was discussed. The neighbourhood was abandoned. Only a few families remained, screaming into the void, they had invested everything in the new house and could go nowhere else. Eventually, after the flies and fires, even the last ones gave up. There are rumours, however, of an old woman, perhaps dead, in the shadows of some prefab never evacuated.
The neighbourhood is still there, desolate and shunned, cut off from the main roads, a small piece of it can be glimpsed from a certain ring road, but more than anything else you can see the flies, a giant swarm, like a black sheet that falls and never touches the ground. The carcasses pile up again and again. If only Tuesday could be eliminated...
stormborns
blakekathryn
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