Rust

The town was rust; built off a dream never realised and swarmed with poverty like locusts. The people were people, but the children were harsh, brittle, bitter from the beer their fathers drank after work. The unintelligent ones lived day by day, the intelligent ones put all their energy into the survival of those brass iron gates; electric, new, surrounding the playground like a prison yard. The ground was scattered with food, and the air with seagulls (although it was nowhere near the sea.) Despite all the evidence of life, at night, it looked abandoned. It is abandoned now. Its another block of flats full of children with no school to go to. A village of concrete with towers of people torturing themselves under the roofs they can’t afford to get fixed. Somewhere in there is a ghost of two people who rocked the boat, whose accidents can’t be fixed, and a small dead boy who lived in a yellow hell.
I never understood the heart of the latter. Lean, from the weight burned away by the cold nights at the skatepark, with friends people never knew but couldn’t bring themselves to care about. He was average I suppose, with brown eyes and the cutting jaw line of a shark, the hands of a pianist and the legs of a turkey; the intelligence of one too. He often squawked out of place, and rarely said anything of interest except the stuff you wished you hadn’t heard. The stuff that came pre-packaged with tears so distraught they came from his stomach and fell right down to his soul.