In which dawn breaks, and no-one will come by to fix it. (Tales of the Mosaic – 343 words)
Tessera
The Broken Dawn
Dawn had broken over Ward Eleven. Though the residents of every tenement on Cobble Street had written letters seeking help, squinting in the dim, sepulchral twilight, the city wardens sent no-one to repair it.
All winter long, the sky remained a leaky inkwell, staining every crooked street in dark and starless blue. Still, the wardens wouldn't budge. For years the residents of Cobble Street had been complaining over leaky pipes and flooded sewers, but the city’s meager budget favored wards with higher living standards. Dawn, they said, would have to wait.
Every night, the shouts of ragamuffins filled the narrow streets, without a sun to mark their curfew. But week by week their shouts grew fainter. As months drew on, their ruddy cheeks grew paler, every alley haunted by the wail of restless waifs, desperately lurking in search of the sun.
The peddlers were not deterred, dutifully taking to their routes to sell their vegetables beneath the streetlamps. The shadows left them easy prey for thieves, but on they marched through the darkness, knives in hand, spilling blood if needed to defend the meager coin their turnips and potatoes yielded. By the turn of spring, there was nothing left to sell: not a single plant within the district lived, and every Ward Eleven garden was a blackened field of pus.
The lights went out on Midsummer's Eve. Beating back the darkness with their lamps, the district had amassed a power bill that all the rent hikes in the world could never pay. When the agents of United Power came to cut the switch, the residents of every building pelted them with bricks pulled from the district’s crumbling facades, and in the stifling heat that night the still-clogged sewers overflowed with blood.
By autumn, every tenement on Cobble Street had been condemned. The residents had been condemned as well, shipped away to prison for the riots, or committed to the workhouse for their squalid way of life.
As the first leaves fell, the bulldozers came, gleaming bright and golden in the early morning sun.