riverrun Vol. 47

The senator entered a café where the collapse and despair had not yet secured its
clutches and took a seat at the counter. He wondered why he had come to this
place. He wondered if he could leave. A man was seated next to him—a tired man
that both time and family had left behind thirty years prior, just as the bad had
become worse and his young frame grew old. He had once worked in construction
when such a thing still existed in Crickback Bay; he hadn’t worked in fifty years.
The senator entered a café and sat next to a man who had witnessed the incident
fifty years prior—who had been the inciter. He had once traveled into the depths
of the city, navigated its serpent sewers and concentric catacombs, who had gazed
upon its very depths. The man did not speak of it; he did not dare to speak of it,
unless, of course, someone was to ask. The senator made the mistake of doing so.
A wry grin stretched over the man’s lips. He asked if the senator truly wanted to
know, that in doing so, he was condemning himself to a life within this city, one
he could never hope to escape from. The senator nodded his head with a grim
smile. He would not be kept within this desolate place, he thought to himself, he
would secure the votes of these hapless people before continuing his campaign.
This city held more than sixty thousand people within its limits. If he won here,
he would never need to concern himself over reelection.
The old man mused over where he should begin his story. A few times he started
too early, and others he started far too late until he managed to gather himself
right where the story should have begun.
He was a young man then. Twenty and married and with two kids brewing inside
a woman he thought agreeable. He worked in construction. Not because he liked
the job, but because they paid the best and the poor kid could hardly count past
twenty. Construction was a fairly new business in Crickback Bay—none had ever
needed to be done. The city had been found twenty years prior and had not
needed any renovations done until recent, hence why a contractor was called in.
Something wrong with the pipes, they had said.
No one thought much of it. Families had been immigrating by the thousands, and
even more were charmed from walking the pier at sunset or watching the boats
steer into the harbor while the sky blushed and the sun bashfully retreated over
the horizon. The water hadn’t yet run brown and the rain did not yet corrode the
streetlights; the pier had not been washed away in a storm and boats still dared
to dock on its shores; the city had not yet fallen to decay.
He went down into the sewers; down into the spiraling depths of the city along
with four other men—all dead now. They would die soon. They were only supposed
to isolate a leak. They followed a spiraling set of stairs into the depths of
the city. Paths split off in every direction like an ant colony, tempting them down
dark corridors to dead ends or spitting them back out to the floor above. There
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