Some days I can’t help but look around and wonder what’s been done to the world. I think about how it got to be this way. I ponder why we haven’t fixed this.
Today is not one of those days. Today, it is all I can do to move. It’s impossible to think about anything important on days like these.
I slog through the city streets. It’s hard to move my legs. The liquid is up to my knees here, a relatively good height for a place like this. In most cities, it goes up to at least the waist. Still, it’s a small mercy. Walking is exhausting no matter how high the substance is. It’s thick, viscous, and smells like metal. It stains our clothes, our hands. We walk around painted red.
Then there’s the knowledge that every day, when we walk around our city, it’s more like swimming through an ocean of blood.
No one knows how the blood got here, or why. All we know is that it’s not going anywhere. People have tried everything: drains, suction, even the good old-fashioned passing buckets. Nothing works. The blood level stays the same no matter what we do.
In other places, it’s easier. Most small towns only have a couple of inches coating the ground, whereas in some cities you really do swim in gore up to your shoulders. Children ride on their parents shoulders, joyfully dipping toes into the wetness and giggling, not understanding what it truly is.
I wish I could be that child again, high enough to only touch the red waters if I desired to. High above this heaviness, this dragging of feet beneath a shining crimson surface. We can’t see our feet, see the ground beneath us. Is there even ground? Is it earthy and brown? Or are we walking on something else? Perhaps we walk on a platform made of bones and hides, and every bump in the road is a displaced femur or a grimacing skull.
This is not really thinking. I still can’t do that at the moment. This is remembering. I have made these conclusions over a thousand times. It changes nothing. I am walking heavily through a sea of muck, and that’s what I will do until the day I die.