Imaginary Cities

Written for Fictionalizing Autobiography

September 8th, 2009

From the perspective of the mountain, the port looked like a dark, squished jellyfish stranded on the beach. Long, wavering docks and boardwalks dangled over the water like tentacles while the top domed out toward the foothills.

A deteriorating stone wall from the late eighteenth century clearly defined the current city limits, as few structures dared to venture outside of the wall. There was one rupture located near the valley where several new buildings had popped up, but it appeared from the mountain to be more like a wound than progress.

The majority of the buildings within the walls looked bloated from constant add-ons. Many of them spilled into the streets, frustrating any attempt city engineers may have made for a simple grid structure. For some peculiar reason few buildings had more than a second story, but a survey of the surrounding landscape explained why.

There were very few trees in the valley. It was narrow, so the winds often picked up, making life for most saplings too hard to bear. The few who dared were gnarled and hunched over, like ancient men and women frozen in time. There were taller trees on the mountain, but a sheer rock face made them unattainable. Up high they stood, the port city’s ideals, a wooden acropolis of the gods.

The wealth that was required to import wood from a neighboring town had left the city long ago. All of the people knew it, and every visitor could sense it. The wind whispered it, taunting the people of the port as they made their clay bricks and poured cement for their crooked streets.

There was once a large river that irrigated the valley. It emptied into a large estuary just outside of the city limits, and steam boats and cargo ferries would haul trade and wealth through the valley to locations all over the country. At the time, the port city thrived. Government considered knocking down parts of the old wall so they could expand into the foothills, while they built more boardwalks and strengthened their docking system so larger vessels could bring in cargo.

The scar of the river could still be seen through the valley, but it was now reduced to a seasonal trickle. A large dam had been built some years ago upriver, and at the time the death of the river was unforeseen. The port city clung onto their steamboats with the possessiveness of a toddler, denying the death of their trade and squandering the city money on pointless civic projects. The only success visible was the half-finished railroad project that crawled up the valley. At the birth of that particular brainchild, the money, like the river, was almost entirely dried up. So the city crawled on its hands and knees, oozing out of the ruptured wall, up the narrow valley, in hopes of rekindling trade and transport. The railroad led the way just barely, the longest finger of the city’s desperate hand.

~Brittanie V.