Rot

It feels like this town is rotting. Like a mound of roadkill left on the side of the road to fester and mold and decompose, fouling up the air and earth around it like the spreading of a disease. You could watch it slowly swallowing up the town, if you knew where to look. Once you noticed it, the revolting illness was all you could see, everywhere you looked, all you ever felt. It started with the people. Their cores began stinking, with slow steadiness turning black. Everytime you stared into their hopless eyes, like black holes on their faces, you could sense the rot starting to eat away at your insides, see it working inside them. Knawing away. The dark depths of their irisis held utter defeat, cupped this dreadful tedium, cradeled a grim lack of life, of luster. The rot spread from their cores to their torso and then to their limbs and then finally to the tips of their toes and toungues, spoiling everything they said and did. It gushed from their mouths when they spoke, in all the same monotonous voice. Spilt from their pores like oil, slipping in a horrific, slow way down their skin like sludge. When smiles occured, as rare as a rainbow, they were stiff and somehow sad-making. Because you realized how broken and futile the effort was to pretend to be happy here. No children played outiside. The streets were saturated with a heavy sickening silence, puncuated by the swish of cars gliding over the roads. The rot spread further. It crawled from peoples fingers and floated away in tendrils of foul-smelling black, sinking into the surroundings. Plants and gardens seemed to delicatly brown and die. Flowers stopped smelling. Even when the weather was bright and colourful , the world seemed black. The place stank. Stank of some empty hopelessness. Of hatred. Of murky stagnant water. Birds dropped from the air onto the streets, feathery corpses lining the street, revolting litter. One little boy pointed, his manner solomn and serious. "Look mommy," he whispered, gesturing to a dove white as the glare of the sun, "Look, look. Todays the day that hope died."