a beginning!

It sure must have been a lot of long crappy years that had seen the place; stomped it flat, burned it up dry with age. The main street like an infected cut, clotted black with trash and broken cars. Storefronts crowded with all that pitiful unbought stuff: plaster crazyladies jiving in ticketed polyester and tins of leprosy stacked behind smeary glass. Spit, shit and dust. And that was only the street that people really saw, passing through on their way through to someplace better. Beyond that, noone really saw where people lived, unless they lived there. And if they did live there, they often weren't too sure of it.

Scabby houses looking like dead dogs on a bad morning; all the pastelley, sticky paint coming off in strips. Sad, twisted eyes for windows, doors like dripping, rotting mouths; forever stuck with something else to yell about. It was only dry grass that grew here, and you saw a lot of kids. Adults were all at the mine. Kids all had a loud way of doing everything. The older ones yelling, racing down the street on their bikes or forming their little fairy-rings in bedroom, lounge or park, passing the pipe of peace.

I was a farmer's kid five miles to the east of there. But I did a hell of a lot of my living there, and I knew a lot of the kids from there. It was dead on twenty years ago now when I last saw the place, heading for my someplace else about as fast as I could, and this is the story for them that's still stuck back there in my mind. Right about now, it's all bubbling through the ground like the shit in a Love Canal, and there's no remedy for that but to share the disease.

(tbc)