SS - Sleeping City

from "Sleeping City" - Kutless

Rain on asphalt. Sun on glass.

The City doesn’t weather the weather, it enjoys it. Fragments of rainbows -appearing in the trod up dust and vanishing again- are the City’s version of a sleepy smile. The changing of days and seasons mingles with the changing of the City’s dreams. Cold is a caress and heat is a blanket. The City slumbers under both. When the sun is bright, the City turns its own lights low, and when the night comes, the City festoons itself with vibrant colour for the striking contrast of radiance against the black. Stars above are seldom seen but they twinkle in all of the City’s dreams.

Built by artists and entrepreneurs, the City now houses dissolute youths and embittered elders. The war between generations is quiet and cruel. But the City’s dreams are populated only by the simply and seriously merry. Working and dancing and eating are all a part of the endless games that the City dreams.

Once, thirty-nine years ago, the City awoke for a moment. A tremulous glistening electrified moment before sunrise. A child wandered away from the boardwalk to the statue at the end of the pier and pressing a warm small thumb to the large stone one said, “hello.”
But before the City could reply, the mother came running and snatched the child away. A maelstrom of fretting and fussing and kisses and warning. But the City fell back into sleep the moment the connection was broken and never knew.

The child grew up and moved away to be an artist somewhere else. And every third painting was of the slumbering City. The artist never knew why.

So the City sleeps in contentment, unaware of pollution or politics, feeling only the reverberations of nature. Buildings fall or decay or burn and others are built. Every summer the roads undergo noisy construction. Every winter snow is sullenly shovelled from one place to another to melt before the cherry trees blossom. Cacophony turns to harmony within the City’s dreams. Disaster turns to delight. Nothing in the waking world holds the power to disturb the City’s rest.

But sleep is not meant for forever.
Dreams cannot defeat time, they can only cheat it for a time.
Neither are cities immortal.
Will the City awake before it dies?

Rain on asphalt. Sun on glass.

A very old woman -too old to be doubtful of magic- sits at her window and wonders. She has grown to be simple and learned to be serious but if there was ever anything merry within her, there is nothing left now. Frigid rain and smothering sun bellow through the cracks and rainbows swirl in the dust. She lights a candle in the day and nothing at night. She hears the grumbles and the curses, different language from different ages but the same tone. She ponders. She waits. She hopes.

The day she falls asleep for the last time is the day the City stirs and startles and, finally, awakes.