A lower-class stucco community seemingly just plopped within a sprawling region of reinforced concrete towers; apartment buildings systematically placed along the periphery of an unkempt courtyard, a façade of tranquility within the variegated fortresses of stone and glass competing for aerial dominance, a solitary patch of green in an area subjugated by the grey of human necessity...
My apartment...
The visual beamed me into existence.
My existence...
An abrupt emergence of somethingness from nothingness; a purposeless somethingness; an ethereal entity interacting within the tangible, corroded shell of this city, unaware of its interactions, unaware of its existence at all: limbo. There I stood, and for the first time, I was aware of my standing, I was aware of myself, aware of all that surrounded me, and aware of my awareness. But, this was not actually for the first time, and I knew this to be the case, for the first time eludes me.
My body was unresponsive for a moment, maybe a handful of moments, frozen between the yellow-orange diagonal lines of a forever unoccupied parking space. How quickly things lose their purpose. These lines have become mere décor, geometric segments of color on an otherwise bland slab of asphalt. There is a beauty if their symmetry. The tension in my neck eventually released and my head swung down, my elongated shadow tilting in the direction of a lone vehicle to my left as if pointing and directing me to approach it. I avoided this beckoning. Instead, I studied the cracks and crevices of my upturned palms. The skin on my forearms resembled moldy cheese, my hoodie was a canvas of dull stains, my pants were unfashionably short for a person of my stature -- birds, then a distant wind chime. Familiar.
Probably most cities resemble this one. Probably most cities are frozen in time, stuck in an unnatural still. Probably most buildings are now hollow, their walls withholding tales of heroism, cowardice, pleasure, and evil from the world outside. The buildings that have managed to retain their life harbor only the scared, the lost, the hopeless, the confused; a shelter from a world of unrelenting struggle, a world consumed by the greed of these mindless creatures, a world controlled by violent egocentrism; they wander these streets, own these streets, hungering for the little that's left, remorseless in their invasion. Perhaps things have not changed as much as one might think.
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Thus Spake the Zonbi - Alexander Dougal
Short StoryCrazed thoughts of a zombie in an apocalyptic world where the undead rule. This is one half of the 'Thus Spake the Zonbi' project, an on-going writing project with no foreseeable conclusion that follows the thoughts and happenings of two inexplicabl...
