[HappyHappyHierophant]

-1-

There were fourteen tin houses strewn along a long, narrow, unnamed and forgotten back lot between a collapsed warehouse and a cinderblock wall separating it from the railyard beyond.

The lot had begun a ditch, and continued to be called as such. During the War, the Ditch had acted as disposal for unidentified bodies and unidentified body parts. From miles away, a sinister orange halo would arise into the sky from the lot, and men and women would look at it and try to ignore the strangely familiar soot that sprinkled down onto the streets and rooftops as shells rang in the distance.

The smell of burning hair and flesh was embedded deeply into the soil, and when it rained, it would sometimes flow into the streets, causing the old, who remembered the war, to shudder and quicken their pace in fear.

[HappyHappyHierophant]

For a few years afterward, the ditch had been abandoned. Thick trusses of crabgrass had covered the lot, growing uncannily well in the tainted soil. They caught pieces of trash and litter, and on quiet moonlit nights, they shone, appearing to be a field of lost souls swaying in the breeze.

They wouldn't be at peace for long. The crabgrass was torn up and the trash and soil overturned and packed flat. Some then infamous but now forgotten kingpin had decreed that the Ditch would be used for a sadistic bare-knuckle fighting ring for debtors who failed to pay off a bad loan for too long. Chainlink fences were erected on both sides, a few feet offset from the wall and the warehouse, where those who would enjoy such mismatched violence would jeer and cheer on from. One contender would enter from one end of the long narrow strip, with his opponent entering on the other.

Whichever person was able to drag the body of their opponent to the other end was the winner. It was quite the popular event for a certain crowd throughout the Slums at the time.

Whatever entertainment the Ditch would provide was short lived. The ring was bust within three years; all of the organizers serving long and hard sentences, until a huge gas explosion had consumed the overflowing prison not far away as the prisoners slept at night.

[HappyHappyHierophant]

The ditch had long been forgotten since then except for the residents of those fourteen tin houses they had built one by one. The ditch's history had been long forgotten, and new space was now available in the slums. Close enough to the factory where many of the new occupants would like clockwork grind bones and mix trash and shit into fertilizer for 18 hours a day.

Rarely a person so much as glanced at the ditch any longer outside of those that would dwell in those fourteen tin houses. Each day, they would leave their houses, exhausted and stumbling through the dark of daybreak, and would then return to them, exhausted and stumbling through the dark of the night. Little change happened within the ditch now, or at least too little change for anyone to notice.

Thus, it couldn't been for surprise that it was not until days afterward that anyone noticed the girl strewn out against the cinderblock wall, blueish white and eyes bulging out of her head, her body bloated and water-logged by the storms that had come inland from the sea over the past days, maggots crawling from her mouth where her unheard story long been washed away.

***

[HappyHappyHierophant]

-2-

A mattress. A small, elegant end table, edges worn. The door, paint peeling, to the bathroom. Those were all the objects that broke up the cracked white plaster walls. As of recent, bottles and take-out containers, sat at the foot of the bed, like a crowd of indiscreet rubber-neckers, gazing at a pair of cold feet. It was bizarre still-life, evoking something frank and gritty.

On the table, the phone rang.

[HappyHappyHierophant]

From his bed, the man pulled back the black velvet curtains with his toes, knocking two of the bottles over.

A single blade of light sliced across the room he blinked towards this. It was well into the morning. He sat up, rubbing his face, coarse stubble from days of negligence brushing against his palms. His hair was greasy. He had a cut on his left temple. The phone rang and rang. Finally the man defeatedly put his palms down and struck the back of his head on the wall behind him and reached for the phone, feeling a little dizzy and nauseous as he did so. He pulled at one end with his finger tips and it jiggled with increasing intensity, until after a few attempts it clattered and hung up on the call. He sighed. He had no doubt there would be consequences for that soon.

[HappyHappyHierophant]

His clothes, or "his" in the loose sense, as almost all of them were secondhand and varied widely in size and taste, were all hung on a pole beside the bathroom door. He briefly stepped inside the bathroom to put some cold water on his face, then faced the mirror with the single crack in it that he always considered symbolic for the minor ways we become unhinged and debated whether or not to shave. Again, as with the other times, he told himself somehow that not one would notice and that this was passing. He grabbed a shirt and a pair of pants without really looking and pulled stared blankly and the expanse of plaster in front of him. Even with all but his shoes on, he continued to stare at the plaster.

After a few minutes, the plaster having had said as little to him as did any other time, he pulled himself up and put on his shoes. At the door, he hesitated to turn the doorknob, the true indicator that he had begun his day. As he did every day, he turned it and stepped outside.

***

[HappyHappyHierophant]

-3-

Views of the Slums didn't vary widely. It was degenerate. A cancer to society. An unsightly and unfortunate consequence of the worst that war brings.

And yet now, it was nothing other than regular. The same politicians who had had declared the Slums a disaster of civilization and a disservice to humanity had conveniently forgotten about them as newer and cheaper public outcries came and went. The Slums wouldn't change, and in that at least provided consistency. You lived with fear and necessity in mind, and more quickly than most would think, it became natural. Or perhaps, your nature.

The man sat outside, on the less shaky of two metal folding chairs, all but rusted through. He pulled out his cigarette case, standard issue but dented, from his coat pocket.

[HappyHappyHierophant]

His service was what brought him to the Slums for the first time. As the war drove both sides further into desperation, he had been called to draft at just 16. His mother and sister and sobbed as they called his name in that small fishing village. The top half of his body had frozen stiff as they led him to the back of the truck, and he remembered feeling completely blank even as his heart raced as he looked back at his sister, holding their collapsed mother, growing smaller and smaller in the distance.

He remembered in the pub that the older soldiers would sit around one another, red-faced and brawhawing, exchanging stories of combat and war and women. For him, eleven months had past until the war had finally ended, and still he couldn't bring himself to recall a story the same way those soldiers did. After eleven months, he had survived. And for that, he was by far more fortunate than the others drafted at his age.

[HappyHappyHierophant]

At one time, he had tried to remember the names of the dozen other boys taken from villages just like his. There was Raory, son of a farmer, who would sometimes accompany his father peddling fresh vegetables through the fishing village. There was Ceryc, who had been the first to crack a joke in that rattling truck.

They had stopped by a small satellite military base, and had been filed out into a line. They were each given a uniform and a gun. For two days, they had trained; they built confidence and what seemed to be the beginnings of camaraderie. The third day, they were moved to another base, and the fourth, they were in combat. That night, only half of them returned. They didn't sleep that night.

In the morning, the sergeant lined them up again and frowned. They were separated and sent to different ranks, runts of the litter. They never heard from one another again.

The man took a long drag from his cigarette.

[HappyHappyHierophant]

"Another trip down memory lane?"

A woman, hair trimmed close to her scalp, put her foot on a nearby cinderblock and leaned towards him. Despite how water was, or for many, wasn't, in the Slums, her shirt was washed, ironed, and starched. Her badge was hooked level on her lapel. She threw another, slightly tarnished and covered with nicks, onto the man's lap.

"You left that at the pub last night. Don't know if you remember." She stretched her arms. "They have us on clean-up duty. The body of some broad near the train tracks."

The man threw his cigarette into the mud and began to get up.

The woman pushed him down again and swung a holster to him. "Your gun."

"You left that too."

***

[HappyHappyHierophant]

- 4 -

Many things characterized the slums. Crumbling concrete, architecture more apt for prisons than living spaces, dirt roads filled with untreated sewage and waste. But one for certain was the amount of unsupervised children running about the streets; nimble, lacking the debilitating radiation sickness that many of those who had been alive to see the war suffered, and unrestricted, with parents too sick or indisposed to parenting and governmental controls effectively inaccessible or spread too thin. Schools in the Slums lacked the ability or resources to reach children that spoke only in one of the multitude of exclusively regional dialects, so many children went purely at whim each day from playing, stealing, and foraging in the filth in these self-formed groups.

It could be argued that these "packs" of children were the most effective social structure in the entire Slums. In their relative innocence due to their age and their need for each other, their trust and faith in one another was cemented and unabated. Here in particular, the "alpha" of the group, wiry, with unruly hair, but with a necklace of cans and bloody bird feathers that clearly denoted him as the leader of group, barked in a local dialect to his comrades, a group of boys and girls ages 6 to 11, as they each with admirable agility took a long leap over the train tracks and scaled the cinderblock wall.

[HappyHappyHierophant]

Together, they stood at the top in a line in accomplishment with the son on their backs, silhouetting them. They would have made an excellent photograph had anyone bothered to care enough. The "alpha" turned towards his following, motioning them to scale downward and off of the roof of one of the tin houses. The rain had overflowed the sewers, perhaps there were things once hidden there that would be of use.

In groups, with the four older "betas" leading responsibly, they each landed onto a tin roof with rhythmic clanks and slid down into the street below. The "betas" led groups of three or four to each corner of the thin lot, pushing past refuse, hoping to find something of interest. The "alpha" stood atop the roof overseeing the activity, but also keeping a needed watchful eye out those that might intrude on their search.

[HappyHappyHierophant]

Abruptly, something seemed off to the "alpha." One corner had grown very quiet, all except for the soft footsteps the young ones backed up cautiously at something obstructed in the corner. The adjacent corner on one side too had noticed, and made a call out to the others.

In a semi circle, the stood around the girl with her peeling bloated skin. The younger children clung to the older ones unsure of what to make of the girl, maggots crawling on her peeling, water-logged skin. The alpha confidently procured a long stick from nearby, pushing past the children. With long pauses, he gave the girl a tap. Then another. Then another. And still the girl was still.

A chill ran down each child's spine, shaking them to core. Death had suddenly become overwhelmingly palpable for the children. Their dark revelation was to be cut short, however, as lights flashed and horn honked angrily in their direction, and they quickly and instinctively disappeared back over the cinderblock wall.

[HappyHappyHierophant]

The woman slammed the car door and cocked her shorn head at the body. "Yeah, it's definitely been there a while. Hope the kids didn't poke around too much before we got to."

The man grunted in agreement. He approached the body, and turned bloated blue-skinned face to the side. The woman followed to look over his shoulder. "Yeah, looks like blunt force trauma to the head here. Took out a piece of her skull too, you see that?" She pointed and soft, rotting, pink patch in the girl's matted hair. "I wonder if we can find it." She looked around, but trash was embedded throughout the mud.

"We'd be best to take her to get ID-ed and examined. I'll grab the tarp."

The girl stared upward, unopposed as they moved her.  Perhaps she wondered who had forsaken her, that her shroud be of fraying blue plastic, and her burial be in the cluttered back of these two strangers' truck.

***

[HappyHappyHierophant]

- 5 -

Their trip to the coroner was not without it's interruptions, as was anticipated. Livestock and peddlers walked in disregard to the occasional vehicle in the main street, just a slightly wider mud path with open sewage running in a shallow ditch in the middle. Men and woman cried out selling withered vegetables and snake oil remedies off of carts hitched to the back of motorcycles or oxen while donkeys brayed at passerby. Children sloshed barefoot and hens pecked around in the mud aimlessly.

The coroner's office looked like any other of the cracking concrete structures sinking in the mud on the road from street. It's front, however contained an opening, guarded only by a chainlink gate and padlock, large enough for the truck enter through. Few people knew the place was a morgue, only knowing that police did something in there and not questioning it as a result, from seeing the repainted armored vehicles from the War entering and exiting in that mysterious abyss-like opening.

The man stopped the vehicle in front of the opening, the woman hopping out, turning the key, and pulling the open. She attempted to kick off some clods of mud from her shoes before slamming the car door as the pulled through. "Hope our Jane Doe enjoyed the ride."