In the near distance, suburbia cried out.
It was a low whine, the sort you’d only ever hear once or for an eternity. It was a sound that brought back the sort of bitter clarity she’d come to hate as she gazed sullenly into the smog-hued infinities of an early Chicago twilight. She spared the heavens but a glance, devoting herself from the safety of her swirling spoon in the cup of coffee she clutched for desperate warmth.
She lamented these days, but it was not as though anything existed beyond them. On the contrary, the world had existed under some terrible pressure for an age, as if they lived in some deep Atlantic cavern beneath the waves.
On nights such as these, however, she hoped to remember rather than lament. Of times when their future had been crowned in shades of gold, an ember wrapped in dry moss and bark to be passed on to those who came next.
The sort of hope that spurred generations on, that drove man to touch the stars and grasp all in between.
Until their spark had run out of tinder and the flame died a sudden death.
And the world choked in the cold.
Now the streets were under the dominion of a sickly neon glow that withered all it touched, painting life in a bright ink that had written few words about them—they had failed. They had come to live in some dreamless place, the sky upheaved by factory fog and the wonder the world had loved, the sort that made you dance, scream, cry and sing, had been snuffed in its infancy while it gasped for breath.
But the world needed wonder like we need sleep, and without it, the days droned on in perpetual, dreaded cognisance.
If you were lucky, perhaps there would be a sculptor on a street corner, imitating Michelangelo with a block of crude marble filled with a sullen crowd, or a speakeasy filled with the silent as the performer chose absence over expression. The world had given a few dying gasps, the last waning vestiges of art fighting a losing war until soon, street corners would be but street corners and speakeasies but old rooms.
She ached for a time where the world could find its flame again, perhaps hidden in alleyways, sequestered in that same moss and bark where the weight of the world couldn’t snuff it out, and nestled within the hearts of the new.
But dreams were dreams, and the idyllic seemed so very distant.
Suburbia cried out and, rather than heed its call, she returned back to her coffee.