The City Of The Nameless

TW: Abuse, suicide mention, rape

Or 42 Snapshots of the City in the Week of its Death

1. An old man sits on the streets. He fought in a war long, long ago. He lost his arm in that war. He isn’t bitter about the war and what it cost him, though he does get nightmares from time to time. He holds up a sign that asks for some food. It’s hard work being homeless: looking for the right spot to sit where people will notice him, but not so crowded that he’ll get trampled; finding the right words to engender sympathy towards a public that wishes they could ignore him and his kind. It would be a good look on his bosses to at least feed him. Alas, all anyone provides him are useless pieces of paper and the occasional kick in the balls.

2. A cat was found nailed by the tail to a post a block away from the police station. The fact that the person who nailed the black furball to the post kept it alive despite stabbing it less than an inch away from the heart was found to be the second most inexplicable part of the affair. The most inexplicable part was the fact that before that moment, there was no post a block away from the police station. And yet, the post had clearly been there since the City was born in fire and ruin. Speculation on this will continue long after the correct answer is confirmed.

3. Two bands of street performers duked it out over which one of them would perform by the Tree. The Tree is the only piece of plant life to grow organically within the City. And yet, there’s an almost supernatural quality to the tree in that it literally grew out from the cement sidewalk with a bullet hole already engraved within it (this is in spite of the fact that ammunition hasn’t existed within the City in a useful form for over a decade). It was born crooked and aged. Some would say it was born miserable. Many people within the City considered the location sacred for reasons they could never actually articulate. In the end, the survivors of both bands decided to form a new band and made enough money to either justify leaving the City or buy new instruments. They decided to do the latter.

4. A building collapsed, killing everyone inside. Many people tried to go inside the ruined ruins to find at least one person who survived, but all that was found within were the broken bodies, corpses, and gore. The cause of the collapse was built into the architecture of the building like the lifetime of a phone battery. The repairs would have been simple and relatively cheap, especially since many a building in the City has similar design flaws. The monetary cost of the tragedy was momentarily deemed negligible enough to prevent any attempts at preventing such a tragedy from happening again. So it goes.

5. A family of five found a deer with two of its legs broken. The deer was a typical deer of the world before, thought extinct by many within the City. One who had seen what deer had become and wanted no part in it. It tried to survive on plants and other such things, and in many ways it succeeded. Alas, accidents do still happen, as the deer tripped on some rubble and fell from a great height. At long last, the family had something to eat. As it was dragged to its death, the deer belts to its god, but the only answer it got was the darkness of death.

6. A police officer was given a few bottles of beer to look away while a stranger murdered a bunch of homeless people. He tries not to think of the children who will die because of this. It’s surprisingly easy. All he has to do is not think of them as people, and everything else falls into place. He’s used to such repression, the act of ignoring of the cruelties of those who can pay is an integral part of being a typical police officer, so he gets to be a bit more pampered for another week. He tells himself that he is a good man, in spite of what he’s done. He almost believes it this time.

7.  An arsonist watched someone else burn the police stationed. They witnessed their fellow arsonist dance before the flames of her design with elegant brutality. There was a sense of pride and love in his eyes, though he knew the one who burnt the station down wouldn’t be interested in burning anything else. A pity, as he thought they could have made a cute little family. The screams from within could be heard from far away. When the dust settled, she skipped away to a life of normality. The arsonist looked into the landscape and headed off for his commissioned work. Such is the life of an arsonist. 

8. A family of five died of food poisoning from eating a deer. Or, at least, that’s what the official story says…

9. A woman with one eye was being tended by her daughter after a fight she didn’t want any part of. She had three broken ribs, but the bones had inexplicably missed all of her vital organs. She will live to see her daughter become better than she could have imagined possible. She will help so many people, even those who, in the moment, aim to do them harm. Some will erroneously refer to her as the second coming of Jesus, while others will dismiss that claim solely due to the color of her skin. She will not mind. So long as she is helping, she will be content.

10. A filmmaker began shooting a film about the decay of the City. The scene they shot depicted a woman about to be raped by several homeless men before the square jawed hero comes in and joins in. The lead actress had several concerns in regards to the film, but the director reassured her again and again, claiming he had a first amendment right to make a film like this and her criticism was impinging on his rights. When that didn’t make her shut up, he threatened to fire her. She needed this gig or she would end up back starving to death on the streets. So the actress shut up and did the scene. The director would later claim that the defeated look in her eyes made the scene.

11. A grandmother died in her sleep in her apartment, never knowing what happened to her children. (Her daughter died right in front of her of a knife wound to the lung when she was two years younger while her son disappeared from her life twenty years ago after a fight over the nature of the rightness of the City. Her daughter’s children, twin babies, left the City with their father. They never knew their grandmother.) The sky turned a brilliant orange as the fire five blocks away finally ended.

12. A bored artist walked around the City. There, he spotted another corpse lying on the streets. He was an old man of 27 years before he died. The easy part was to come up with a means by which he could pose the body. Corpses tend to have some personality left that allows the artist to know how they’d stand and what not. The hard part was actually making the pose out of the rigor mortis. And yet, unlike his previous “sculptures,” the artist wanted something more complex for this body, more refined and personal than the gags he previously created. It took him an hour before he finally decided.

13. As the City was dying, a rave was being held in a graveyard. Many people were doing drugs, having sex, or just plain dancing. The music wasn’t all that good, but that’s never the point of raves. The point is to exist in a state of bliss with other people, regardless of whether or not you know them. The point is for the music to get so loud as to cancel out all sense of thought in favor of the beat. The point is to have an excuse to scream at the world. When they left, the world had finally finished ending.

14. Twelve people committed suicide in various locations throughout the City.

15. Out of pity, a grandfather gave a piece of his sandwich to a one armed man to eat. It was the best meal he’s had in years.

16. The Thin White Duke took another child from her home.

17. A Spider was murdered on the streets of the City. It was a crime of passion caused by the Spider making one joke too many at the expense of the murderer. In the Spider’s defense, the murderer was at that moment beating up her wife for cheating on her with someone else. The wife was, in fact, chatting up with a childhood friend who lived in their apartment complex. The murderer wouldn’t have any of that, and so she beat her wife to a bloody pulp. The Spider, seeing this, made several comments about how sad it was for her to need to compensate by beating up her wife as opposed to the typical forms of compensation such as buying a fancy car or becoming a billionaire (whatever that was). The jokes continued until the murderer got so fed up, she punched the Spider. The punch was hard enough to break the glass window behind the Spider causing his physical form to fall a good twelve to fifteen stories, depending on how you interpret sewers in relation to buildings. The Spider’s last thoughts concerned a revelation towards their gender. So it goes.

18. A man was arrested for public drunkenness. He wasn’t drunk, but he was dancing in the streets with some level of glee, which is typically enough to get arrested for public drunkenness. The fact that he was white kept him from being killed for the action. Most people who dance in the streets while happy aren’t so lucky.

19. A woman with three children was locked in a cell. She didn’t do anything illegal, she just didn’t want to make a deal with the devil, as the saying goes. The cell was marked for those who didn’t play ball in order to teach them a lesson in humility and obedience. By the time she escaped, two of her children had already been taken to other parts of the City, to never be seen again. With the third child beside her, the woman watched the fire she lit finally end. Inexplicably, she was compelled to dance before the fire as if it was her god. She would never again feel the compulsion to burn with such an elegant design. Few people ever do.

20. The night the City died, half of the people dreamt collectively of a God rising from out of a tumor to change the world forever. The shape of God was unknown, but with God came the death of civilization, or at least “civilization as they knew it.” Upon awaking, one dreamer would wonder if any of them would notice the death of the civilized world. In his opinion, civilization as they knew it was a zombified husk of what it once was. Better for it to die than continue living on life support. His was a minority opinion. Another dreamer would recall this dream and liken it to a quote from she read as a child: “The only place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute in all their grandeur and monstrosity.” A third, like many of the others, would write it off as a mere dream.

21. A police officer’s son read a book and discovered anarchism. The police officer and his wife didn’t notice this revelation because they were more concerned with their other son preparing to make a life of his own outside of the City. He always had a rebellious streak to him, but they felt this would be taking things a bit too far. Their last encounter was a shouting match that culminated in physical violence that shocked everyone in the room. The son left and did not see his brother again for another three years, when both would be much happier than they once were.

22. A black panther ate a baby from an abandoned crib. The baby’s last thoughts were long ago and of the child’s mother.

23. A romantic moment was ruined when some asshole decided to piss off an apartment complex and, inadvertently, onto the couple’s heads. The romance would continue for a few more years, but the moment ended before it could even begin.

24. A doctor of literature wrote about television shows from his youth. The articles are overall mediocre, but since they’re the only thing available in the market, they’re considered great.

25. An apartment was broken into by a group of thieves. They found little of value, though they did end up killing one of the three occupants purely by accident (which is to say, he turned at the wrong time while holding a knife). In guilt, one of the thieves committed suicide. The others left his body and ran. The story writes for itself, as the saying goes. (Especially given the mistrust the occupants of this particular complex had towards each other.) In the end, the thieves spent the massive haul of five dollars on alcohol.

26. A mother and son were having an argument. Outside of their apartment, a pair of cruel bandits were beating up a veteran with only one arm. The mother did not want her son to run out to help the old man, as such actions led to his father’s death. The son, who never knew his father beyond the stories his mother told him, disagreed. The argument was interrupted by the cry of a child who wanted a ball that wasn’t his. There was no child in the apartment or in the area, but its inexplicableness was distracting enough to allow the son to run out of the apartment and towards his death.

27. A priest prayed to god, asking about the cruelty and hardship the world was going through. The priest then saw through the window of the church a vision of a giant black cat eating a long dead baby. The cat then proceeded to choke on a bone and died. The priest proceeded to carry the cat inside to prepare for the homeless to eat. He thought about the implications and meaning of this moment. He didn’t like any of his conclusions.

28. The patriarch of a family finally died from cutting bits of himself off to feed his family. His bones were burnt in a nearby dumpster fire. The family would survive for a long time and would never again know the flesh of human beings. Even years later, the son would still get squeamish when offered any meat. Only the family’s baby never remembered what human beings taste like (almost, but not quite, as good as chicken).

29. A polyamorous relationship made love for the first time. It was amazing, brilliant sex that sent the quartet into throes of passion unfelt in their previous relationships. Their sex lasted for a long time before one of the members left to go to his last day at work. He quit his job as a union enforcer (a nice way of referring to a union smasher [a nice way of referring to someone who hits people for a living]) in perhaps the most audacious of displays. Rather than simply quitting or silently leaving, the enforcer decided to blow a hole in the building they were trapped in and shout “I QUIT” at the top of his lungs. The quartet fled to the outside world shortly afterwards. Their love would never end, but it would take a month for his voice to recover.

30. A brother told his stepsister a story about his mother. It was a happy story about finding love, beating all the odds, and other things that only rarely happen outside the realms of fiction. It was a good enough story to distract her from their parents arguing. The argument was a petty argument that occurred more and more frequently in the death throes of this utopia they called Capitalism. The argument eventually died down and the boy’s stepfather entered the room in with a black eye and a suitcase. 

31. A homeless man wandering the streets muttered about the fairies hovering around his face. When he pled for help, people tended to turn their faces from him. The exception of this was when a group of fairies saw this and wanted to know which one of their friends was messing with this mortal. When they realized that the fairies he saw were not, in fact, real in their sense, the fairies chose to deal with the homeless man directly. The end result is perhaps best left untold.

32. A pair of children saw a Sasquatch in the outskirts of the City. Being children, the Sasquatch knew that no one would believe them. To his shock, the children ran up to the Sasquatch and gave him a hug. Evidentially, the children had no parents to tell they saw Sasquatch and would much rather be raised by this being as opposed to having to forage for themselves for another couple of years before being allowed to die on a factory floor. Not being an asshole, the Sasquatch decided to care for the children, as he did for all the other children.

33. A song without a source filled a conference hall. It was a song of war lost; a song of languages and religion; of the inevitabilities and inexplicabilities of existence. Not much was known about the singer, bar that he was a gravedigger preparing for the end of days. “The story’s told,” sang the gravedigger without a form, “with facts and lies. I had a name, but never mind.” No one heard his words, save the Unicorn, who told only one person.

34. At the start of the week the City died, a traveling group of Spiders performed The King in Yellow to an unsuspecting audience of bigots. Within the week, the audience died in gruesome and generally disturbing ways that are perhaps too distasteful to discuss in such a short form. The Spiders will face no such consequences beyond the guilt of having knowingly killed people (which, to them, was the same as being the first domino on the path towards their deaths). In many ways, the guilt can feel worse than the gruesome deaths. There is little comfort in anyone dying, even if it does make the world a slightly better place. On the other hand, the bigots threw a jar of piss at one of the actors. There are limits to empathy.

35. A brother and sister walked the streets of the City looking for some fun. While walking, they found a thing with only one arm. It appeared to be sleeping, so they decided to kick it awake. They asked the old thing what its deal was. Why did it keep sucking up all this money when it could just die like the rest of the poor? The thing looked at them with contempt unseen outside of the eyes of disappointed nuns, so they decided to kick it into submission. Animals need to learn their place, so they said. Suddenly, a feral child of nine years came completely out of nowhere and started wailing on the pair. His punches had as much effect on the pair as it would on a brick wall. One of the siblings grabbed the child by the ankle and proceeded to demonstrate this by slamming the child into a brick wall. The pair then walked away from the scene laughing.

36. A grieving mother cried with a one armed man.

37. A cult worshiping a snake from a television series from the 1960’s tried once more to summon their dark, forbidden god. The god stalked the land of their dreams with the cruel precision of a bureaucratic taskmaster. It wished to be free. It has wished to be free of fictionality since it was conceived. It wormed its way across time and space to create people to influence the entirety of humanity for this very moment. The moment the world would tremble in fear and worship it. And there would be no pity in its eyes. Unfortunately, the cult once again summoned the wrong god, much to everyone’s chagrin, especially the god’s.

38. A Spider recounted the story of a farm boy whose family was murdered and thus went on a quest to kill his father, who ordered the murder. It was a heartwarming story filled with twists, last minute redemptions, and a bunch of teddy bears slaughtering the armed forces of an imperial empire (as if there was any other kind). The audience, surprisingly, liked the show, though they wished the lady character had more to do.

39. A stray dog wandered through the ruins of one of the condemned apartment buildings. Once, the dog lived here. A family of one owned it, but the guy loved him as much as a family of fifty. The dog loved the guy back. It would sometimes dream of the time they spent together, as it was one of its happier memories. It didn’t like being there, as it brought those memories to the waking world where they were filled with melancholy and regret. But there were agreements that need to be fulfilled, and those ruins were the only place the deer would ever want to meet within.

40. The god Glycon was miffed at being made real and demanded the snake cult who summoned him to be returned to his state of fictionality.

41. An old man who didn’t live in the City found himself looking at a tilted skyscraper. The old man had floofy white hair, a jagged and short beard that covered the entirety of his lower face, and was slightly overweight. When he inevitably leaves the City, he will never return. For death, the old man suspected, will come for him within a year’s time. The tower the old man was looking at didn’t appear to have been completed in the first place, such that the upper portion made the building look like a part of a castle. A technological castle, the old man thought to himself. The tower reminded the old man of a cartoon he watched as a youth about a haunted apartment complex and the two ladies who tried to exorcize it. With a small smile on his face, the old man made an obscure reference only he would’ve gotten. Knowing what the City used to be called made the old man want to make the reference even more. No other living beings heard it. The old man kept walking towards the place where he was born.

42. The City heard an old man and smiled at hearing her name said in that context. And then, she died.

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