Municipal Diagnosis

by JWGoll

Twenty-three days of deep, low granite sky in midsummer, no trace of sun or cheer. Even trees sweat in this heat and humidity. Something is not right. The report says a stalled high pressure system, but I’m suspicious. This feels more like entrapment, a cocoon. The river refuses to flow, pretending it’s a lake. Without notice I am in a place that no longer exists, but this is not time travel, which is impossible, right? Cynical, sarcastic dogs, steep crumbling sidewalks patched with planks, cuneiform street signs, children speaking in guttural tongues, half collapsed wattle and daub homes, and music grinders with carnal monkeys tell me this is another world, but which one? The odors; lilac, opium, corpse flower, and burnt onion infiltrate my clothes, hair, skin. Maybe this is all just in my head, but then another person across the street shouts, “Hey, where the fuck are we?” and I’m not so sure.

This happens to me more than I’d like. The city exists in more dimensions than it lets on. My old industrial town is no longer graspable. The hundred foot cliffs in the middle of cornfields; the Victorians built against the escarpment; the boulders calved from the cliff crushing houses and people. The impossible river with insufferable, bellicose fish and the smell of sour mash. The floods creeping up the bluff, sucking those same Victorians into our black, bottomless Styx. This is considered acceptable risk for the reward of living in a sullen dreamland.

When I see five policemen outside my door, I think my time is up. They are wrapped in long black dusters and sway and move their hands and arms rhythmically, like druids at a ceremony. They are circled around a small, lumpy package in the gutter and for a terrible moment I think it’s the corpse of a child. Then I see it is a dog with blood coming out of its mouth, body covered with soggy rags. The policemen walk away, turning back occasionally, puzzled, in a way police rarely are, as though they are considering whether they did right by the dog. “Here I am,” I shout, but they say I’m of no interest and to go about my business or they will bust my ass anyway.

Five more days of silent, malevolent weather, then the sun peeks through. People swarm the streets, malls, and parks with grins and a bounce in their step. Stores are full of giddy shoppers, hymns burst from churches, taverns open early, bikinied women glide the river on sailboats, skywriters ply poetry. Newspapers deny the obvious and say this was just a heavy, slow-moving front. They can’t explain the hundred thousand dead, stinking birds, or the disappearance of the north star. But I see everything has changed. I deny schizophrenia. No, this is a municipal diagnosis, and I wander among my fellow citizens, wary, searching for a place which doesn’t exist any more. Remain naive if you wish, but we used to live in one world. Now we live in another.

JWGoll is a writer and artist currently working as a Patient Advocate at a large hospital in North Carolina. His fiction is born of experiences as a photographer in Chicago, the Dakotas, and Central Europe. His creative non-fiction comes from working in healthcare.