Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction Group 3 - 2017 | Page 151

Old Shanghai
Dulwich College Beijing, Lee, Bryan – 15
I
walked among the deadest trees and stalked the silent bodies.
No one could be heard. There was no one left to hear. Everyone, everything, is so
absolutely… dead. Of course, they tend to be when I’m around.
Around me were monotone buildings, formerly sleek, now dusty. The streets, once clean,
were now smeared in blood and dirt and glass and urine. Vehicles, flipped upside down, breathing out smoke. A
picture of a crippled and ruined utopia.
The walls, however, remained standing, and remained as glorious as before.
They were so high in length and so wide in width that I could not see any end to it. I was at a far distance
from it, and yet they seemed as crisp as clear an image can possibly be to an eye.
A mortal eye.
After admiring it I walked into the direction of where a giant shadow is cast from the highest building in
the area, a towering titan whose height rivals its city’s walls. The tower was jet black like the rest of the buildings,
and its condition was spectacularly worse, with the glass that formed its outer shell missing from half the building,
revealing the ruined skeleton within. Inside were nothing but ash and bones scarred grey, and an occasional object
of color that set the contrast between the glory of its former condition and the reality of the present.
As I walked, my feet felt the tickle of broken glass piercing through the bottom of my shoe and slightly
into my sole. The architect’s obsession with glass was no doubt fascinating and stylistic, but was also unnecessarily
useless. Sure, it looked pleasant and sleek, but a society as fragile as this one was going to break sooner or later, and
the glass simply helped with it. Broken glass also hurts a lot.
As I went nearer towards the giant entity that was the high broken tower of glass, the more glass there were
on the ground, all of them glimmering with a faint hint of scarlet. The majority of the glass were half stuck into the
very dead bodies of the city people, with some of their eyes wide open, and teeth stuck to a twisted frown that
almost resembled a smile. The bodies were easy to avoid. They were large in comparison to the pieces of glass and so
were no trouble for me. All you had to do was step over them.
That was when I saw him. He was sitting on a partially glassless area of the ground and was leaning against
the main doors of the giant tower. I was still far away from the tower, but upon making my discovery, I sped up my
journey and in no time, made my arrival.
He was bald, revealing scars on the bare skin on his head. One of his eyes was covered with a piece of cloth,
crudely ripped and crudely taped on using duct tape. He was wearing a business suit, and for some strange reason
there was no blood or scratch or glass on it at all. He was holding a cigarette with his gloved right hand.
As I approached he looked up and saw me, gesturing with his hand to acknowledge that he was aware of my
presence. He put the cigarette in his pockets, along with his hands.
“Where had you been?” he spoke. His voice was half shattered.
“What happened?” I asked.