The Thirsty City
Autor: Camila Lobato Rajão | Publicado: 2009-11-01T20:39:00-08:00

	<!--[if gte mso 9]>     Normal   0   21         false   false   false                             MicrosoftInternetExplorer4   <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]>     <![endif]--> <!--  /* Style Definitions */  p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal 	{mso-style-parent:""; 	margin:0cm; 	margin-bottom:.0001pt; 	mso-pagination:widow-orphan; 	font-size:12.0pt; 	font-family:"Times New Roman"; 	mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; 	mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} @page Section1 	{size:612.0pt 792.0pt; 	margin:70.85pt 3.0cm 70.85pt 3.0cm; 	mso-header-margin:36.0pt; 	mso-footer-margin:36.0pt; 	mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 	{page:Section1;} --> <!--[if gte mso 10]>   /* Style Definitions */  table.MsoNormalTable 	{mso-style-name:"Tabela normal"; 	mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; 	mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; 	mso-style-noshow:yes; 	mso-style-parent:""; 	mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; 	mso-para-margin:0cm; 	mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; 	mso-pagination:widow-orphan; 	font-size:10.0pt; 	font-family:"Times New Roman"; 	mso-ansi-language:#0400; 	mso-fareast-language:#0400; 	mso-bidi-language:#0400;}  <![endif]-->             In black and gray nuances, there was a city in the middle of nowhere. It isn’t a common place, there was something in the air, something dense and heavy. There were no children there, it was strange actually, but people were born and became adults immediately. It was as if the childhood wasn’t important for them or they just didn’t know how this sweet and enchanted little piece of time could be so pleasant, so unforgettable.              You couldn’t see the mountains if you were on the street, you couldn’t see the field or even the horizon. It wasn’t because these things didn’t exist or because people were blind to see some special things, in fact they were, but not in this case, not in simple cases.              Come! Fast! See! You can see, you can see where they were. There they were! Hundreds and hundreds of people dressed in black clothes, people looking down at the ground, walking, marching in some kind of gloomy military discipline. Can you recognize who was a man and who was a woman? I can’t. They kept going in disillusioned steps.              So now we can follow them, come on! Walk fast, stay behind the last row of these human machines. Now look up at the sky!              The sky of that city was made of holes, actually people could just see small parts of  the gray sky, if they looked up, what they didn’t do.              Those people didn’t wear shoes, but their feet were covered by a thin, sickening smoke of coal. They woke up in the dark, swallowed their food fast and left home to their scary procession. During all day they were drowned in the shadows. There wasn’t gleaming places or bright green oaks, there was no nature, except for the rats, the bugs and the cockroach. When the night fell down, all those miserable people without faces, hands or feet – all these parts were hired under the dirty-, left small and crooked doors made of branches and did the way back.              The street wasn’t the first floor of the city, it was the last one. People came out of the doors and started the way back, they went down, down, down under the culvert, under the rat’s houses. When people stopped going down they were already close enough to hell. They lay in their beds and covered themselves with an old and soiled blanket, but their feet of coal stayed out of the bed.              In the next morning, everything was exactly the same of the day before and the after. People there never asked themselves why they lived like that, who they worked for or why the lived inside the ground. They never went up with their head up, looking up. They always looked at the ground, to the small dirty gloomy kind of life.              Why did they do things that way? I don’t know, they didn’t know either. But I know something, I was there once and my heart cries of fear of going there again. When I was there I followed those people and I looked up, you saw that too. You saw the sky and you saw the monsters which pierced that soft gray wrap. You saw the skyscrapers, you saw them stretching themselves over every single empty space. You saw. You realized, as I did, that they were alive, they could and they did control everything there, everybody.              The skyscrapers did their slaves, their slaves feed their machines and they grow, they kept growing with energy of the lives they stole. And that was the destiny of the city, of the skyscrapers and of those who lived to feed the ambitions of the greatest.