Life and Guts
The air tasted of smoke, and smelled of pizza and pretzels, and warm, sticky, lathered in sugar and honey peanuts. The buildings were a drab grey, the cars of muted tones, occasionally, around this area, there would be a brightly colored luxury car slowly rushing by, taking its time, the owner wanting to make sure his status in this most powerful of nations, in the most busy of cities was appreciated, and seen. The clouds were thin, but opaque, the sun all but blocked. It was a drab day, the sounds were muted too. But for the sound of wind as it whistled by, bringing with it frigid chill and frosted cold.
The cars were silent as they made their way, proceeded in a procession along the big road. Orderly, well maintained. Just what you would have expected from the most powerful nation in the civilized world. The area was dusty and dirty, but that made sense, this was the most oft used, and least oft, sometimes for that same reason, least oft renovated and upgraded port in all of the land. Tens of thousands of people came in from different cities and towns, mostly because they were cheaper to live in than this city, came in every single day to work under some authority that made its living in the den of capitalism and civilization. Yet from the bespoke suit wearing banker in the tallest tower or observatory, watching the city beneath his feet, on his phone giving orders that would move billions of dollars, would impact millions of lives, to the small hot dog stand owner, who would serve a few hundred people a day, trying to keep the ground from slipping underneath his feet and those of his two sons, a daughter, and immigrant wife, all of them were invisible. Every single one of them mattered but naught.
The lure of this city was that it promised fame, it promised status and success. Yet when you reached the pinnacle, the spire at the very top of the world, no one could see you for who you were. Just another one of the very few that had made it. The rest of the world would look up, for a brief instant, would see Icarus in the sky, then you would come tumbling down, no matter how hard you planted your feet, no matter how long you stayed. You would come tumbling down like the heaviest stone from the tallest building, all your prestige an anchor in the deepest darkest ocean, weighing you down, tilting the Titanic of your life and dreams.
It promised fame, it promised recognition. Those were the clogs that turned the city, kept the gears moving, kept life carrying on, slowly, steadily. Fuelled the cars, fuelled the polished shoes, and the unpolished sneakers, and the shoe polishers, and the bankers and the tailors, and the aspiring models surviving on Thin Crisps and those that sold dreams of unattainable bodies to the masses. It promised the world. Red carpets, rose bouquets, crowds waiting offstage.
In this greatest and most civilized of cities, cars trudged past on the grey road, some over, some beside a small mass. Upon closer inspection, it was a bird. The smoke ripped open, guts trying to escape, as the poor bird was caught unaware, everything squeezed to one point by the heavy tire of a few hundred pounds of a metal beast. Guts spilled out, blood long gone. One life extinguished in a blink among the many slowly being snuffed out every single day.