A World in Black and White
Posted by A Great Liar
[The following is an excerpt from a currently undergoing novel, 'Requiem for a Vertical Man']
One quick glance at Raspil and you would suspect that he was a rat who has learned to evolve with the passage of time and exposure to human bondage. Learned to speak rather than squeal and to walk on two, a lone survivor distinguished from the rest of his clan beneath the swells and filth of the life underground; a labyrinth of dark sewers populated by the blind seers that feed upon the human waste, and look upon them as would an ill-treated disciple upon the Godhead responsible for their little misfortunes.
He entered the East End of the city, after one long hour of walking, an abstract figure with his head down, with usual brisk strides. Just one of his daily night walks.
Raspil has always felt more at home in the suburbs of the low, with the weakly lit street lights, and poorly maintained houses with broken porch stairs and the fuzzy window panes with secret messages scratched all over its glass. The old bricks that have witnessed millennia of living their lives, never to stir a limb, or utter a whimper of complain, for the years of inhuman conditions it has endured, forever plunged into the sinful cycle; the livelihood of the East End inhabitants.
The usual expressions stayed frozen for ages on the heavy laden doorways, made of thick wood from which arose a dull odor of ennui and old age, and men who appeared out of them every morning, leaving behind a stupor to join the squalor that they have grown to love and hate in their own peculiar ways; the way of an East Ender.
Silly rabbits seeking heaven in the most unlikeliest of the rabbit holes, behind dark lanes of the slums and dwellings, at the Hogan’s Alley, with years grown immune to the stench and foul odor of the little dens carefully tucked in between the residences of poverty, where strangers made merry on most nights during the week. And come every weekend, it was a mass requiem of the sinners and the unfaithful, men with prospects of syphilis, and the painted fairies of the dark who much appreciated their penchant for doom and feasted on it.
Silly rabbits seeking heaven in the most unlikeliest of the rabbit holes, behind dark lanes of the slums and dwellings, at the Hogan’s Alley, with years grown immune to the stench and foul odor of the little dens carefully tucked in between the residences of poverty, where strangers made merry on most nights during the week. And come every weekend, it was a mass requiem of the sinners and the unfaithful, men with prospects of syphilis, and the painted fairies of the dark who much appreciated their penchant for doom and feasted on it.
14 comments: