Evolution and Devolution
Created: 2024-05-15 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-16 (18:22:02)Status: completed
2024-05-13: “write about evolution and devolution. How do we unravel and reravel? Think about what histories our bodies and communities and species and worlds are made of.”
Fragment one. The grid functioned only intermittently at this point. On the times it did and all the streetlights flicked on, the ones that still had bulbs at least, I’d walk down the long arterial westward drive, passing through and between the discs of light. It felt safer this way, even if the roads were always empty at night, and even if, light or no light it would make no difference if someone tried me.
A few kilometres down, just before the road crossed the lake, was a pile of abandoned roadworks. The lanes each way narrowed down between reflective bollards, passing by an unfinished extension. The workers never had got to the point of sealing it. Over winter the flat stretch of gravel road had got churned up, become a permanently muddy quagmire. Half-submerged traffic cones and slow-down signs.
Bordering the road on the eastern side and extending well beyond the point it gave out was the outer fenceline of the exclusion zone. The paddocks between it and the inner fence were a black blankness. Tonight with the network up one could just see lights on in the building deep inside its borders among the eucalyptus groves.
On the western side were more earthworks, also fenced off. This had been a greenfield, then it was marked for the new development, then it was abandoned. The extension would have serviced all the traffic headed out of it in the morning for the city, then back in the evenings to the townhouses and apartments. The hoardings remained up but covered in graffiti.
We knew by now the course of things would not be resuming. The power was becoming more inconsistent. No one was wasting fuel just to drive around. No one would build new suburbs and no one would live in those imaginary homes. At this point I may have been the only person still around who remembered this place had even been planned for, who remembered this abandoned mire still existed. Certainly i was the only person spending the warm summer evening this side of town.
There was not much I would miss about this city or the time I had lived here. Some deep-amphibian part of me was almost pleased to see things becoming wet and marshy, to see the glossy vehicles bogged and stalled, streaked inside and out with mud, stains appearing on the sheer-sleek concrete facades of offices and apartment buildings.
I’d miss places like this, always the first sign the city was approaching, its first foray in terraforming the grasslands and wetlands. I liked the jumble of signs and barriers and the way the whole construction site would empty out after dark, as though each night it were open for other creatures to occupy, even to take all the half-dug earth and equipment and shape it into something wholly different, for things wholly different.
The streetlights began to flicker and dim. A brownout. I was leaning up against the fence on the side of the exclusion zone. I’d have to navigate the labyrinth of construction works to reach the road again. There was no way to manage that if the lights went out. I hadn’t brought a flashlight. Idiot.
But the power held on in that dimmed and flickering phase long enough for me to get back to the road. Then at once with an audible grunt the streelights shut off and it was me and the moonless evening, and a slow, careful walk back towards my home.
Endmatter
Tags: @completed @fiction @muse-ariadne
Return to: Muse Ariadne