A Town

A town isn’t a living thing - not in the traditional sense. It doesn’t breathe, doesn’t eat, doesn’t speak, doesn’t feel. Yet it does exist and it can die. Its heartbeat is the presence of people. Its voice is that of the community they develop. And when the people abandon the town, it will die a slow and lonely death. It’s unclear if this town had ever lived. It seemed to have been born, yet still suspended in that brief second before it takes its first breath. The wooden constructs were rotting away after years of going untouched. The once vibrantly painted signs had faded away from decades of sunlight and no one to retouch them. The windows were no longer transparent but coated in thick blankets of dust. This town existed, there was no denying it. But this town had never lived.

Without any grand gesture, that all changed. It changed with a few clumsy footfalls as a woman stepped onto the road and her eyes fell upon the town for the first time. Her breaths were labored and her skin was dirty with a roadmap of blood streaks across it. Her feet were bare and cracked.

As her knees connected with the ground, the town finally took its first breath.