The City of Signs

Possibly the best euphemism for violent debt-collection

practices that I have ever seen.

The last city I lived in was a City of Stairs.  Everything was above something else, and usually a bit to one side, maybe on kind of a slant.  I loved that.  It looked like everything sort of half-grew, or as though things were being built so quickly the forming structures actually collided and wound up wrapped around each other the way trees sometimes grow through an iron fence.  There was a tremendous sense of narrative and life to it.  Also, rents were very affordable.

My current home is a City of Signs.  Some, like the one at the top of this post, are pretty ordinary but funny in their way.  Some, like the signs reminding drivers that vehicular manslaughter of construction workers isn't very nice, are bizarre by virtue of the fact that they need to exist at all.  Still others are probably more intriguing than they were intended to be.  None, so far as I can tell, originate with any higher power than the private companies charged with all the city's services.

The short story I'm working on now, along with at least a couple of other projects that are simmering in the background, is set in the city I used to live in.  The thing is, a city like that is a character in such an obvious way; the stories are all over the surface, you can't avoid them.  Those stairs take you places, where things happen, and strange characters collect on them, vagabonds and punks and drifters.  A city like this, on the other hand, hides everything behind the signs.  It's a city of cryptic clues and frustrating hints, and to get at its stories you have to go digging in the dirt for them.  Which is fine, but harder to use.

Or maybe I'm just more of a stairs kind of guy.  The test, I suppose, will be where what I'm writing after I move away from here is set.

Normally, who would think of removing an animal
from the park?  Now, who can think of anything else?