atlanta floods.

| July 13th, 2012

There arises in the centre of the city a great moat. Steep sides cut deep into the fabric. Its flow is quick and unrelenting. To cross without bride or careful navigation would be certain death. Few have tried and fewer have survived. This gash across the city splits it in two. The flow of this great body is more complex than most. Currents flow in both directions and speed is highly variable. Sometimes it becomes an almost stagnant crawl; heat rising lazily in the oppressive summer sun. Other times the pace quickens. Low tides speed up the flow to dangerous speed; the eye can barely track its motion.

At night this fowl body glows. Illuminated from within, the mighty rumbling currents of movement rarely cease. The glow continues horribly from dusk to dawn. Reds and whites mostly, the colored illuminations track the currents direction.

Stagnant fumes arise and cover the city. A hot summer day covers the whole city in a gray smog of terrible smell. The denizens hardly seem to notice. Or perhaps there are hardly any to take notice. Most retreat into the farthest corners of the city where the stagnant pollution can hardly reach them. They invent hermetically sealed forms of transit to protect themselves from irreversible damage.

 

Hardly any life can live in this great gash across the city: only the most aggressive of plant lives and the most resistant of small creatures. A larger mammal, black and white, stumbles into the currents. It hardly has a chance on its own. Rescue teams rush to save one of the few remaining animals of the city and carefully place it back into its manipulative habitat.

At the end of an industrial or agricultural living, millions flood the city, desperate to work in the final hope for the city, the service market. An almost desperate attempt as the tides rise in the bisecting body. Flooding is imminent and rising global tides aggravate an already dire condition.

The river floods. The city waits.

 


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