Pale Green Fingers

It's been a while since anybody paid the park's association. Somebody somewhere once decided that keeping up with all the tasks that came with having a park should be a private matter. It's not a great place to spend time, if scenery or smell is a factor at all. Somebody somewhere once joked that cities had the tendency to turn whatever space eas still free into something it needed, but couldn't be bothered to put too much effort in. Of course there are some green areas still. Nature likes taking back things, if left to its own devices. It's not a healthy green though. It's pale, sickly, interspersed with blotches of brown yellow, topped off with the texture of dead or dying things. Not that it's surprising exactly. Those things that hang languidly from the skeletons of old buildings and rusty fences have spent the last decade or so being choked by waste that seems to find its way everywhere nowadays.

The sickly green has even spread to the fountain in the center of the park, where heroes of old congregate to slay a serpent several times the size. Pale green fingers have a stranglehold around both swords and shields, are spread into the air. A small copper pipe protrudes from the place where the serpent's neck is severed, discolored condensation collecting around the rim and accumulating into a lip consisting of minerals both poisonous and not. There is still water behind the low facsimile of city walls. Less than there had been once - a lot of it had leaked through the cracks running partway down the side of the fountain and released the noxious soup of pollution accumulated through the last few years into the ground, drenching the roots of the plants surrounding it and calcifying around them. Still, it's high enough to submerge the serpent's tail in impenetrable, syrupy black. A small copper plaque holds the crack in the fountain together. It's turned black now, but it used to identify each of the Apollonian figures on its center emerging victorious from the final battle of their epos against tyranny and evil incarnate. Now they, and their eternal adversary go nameless. On rainy days, grime runs down the severed head of the serpent, held aloft by a pale green hand, blackened by dirt and clutching at the large, fanning ears. It pools in the eyelids, pouring black, inky tears down into the pool below, bemoaning its fate. As is custom for these statues, the scene is mirthless. The serpent's expression is frozen in a final and rueful howl, while the expressions of the figures surrounding it are still caught in the moment, just before the victory will have registered in earnest, so they spell desperation amd resolve. The toxic lifeblood of the serpent that would have spewed from its neck, coating these heroes in a soft, wet shine has given way to black patches, making the edges where muscle and cloth meet stark and cavernous, starving bodies that had been sculpted to the peak of athleticism into an atrophied imitation. Where the center figure's blade is still pointed at the body of the serpent, the other weapons point outwards, at the plants threatening to take back their space. For years these blades and the icy sting of winter has kept them at bay, but now the ivy has caught hold on spears and arms, pulling them out of formation and into the muck. It's fueled their growth, slow as it is, and now their long arms have closed their stranglehold around the neck of the hero who has slain the serpent.

Elsewhere, a large tree stands withered and slanted on a clearing of pale flowers. It cries sap from spots where the bark has worn thin and brittle, shedding in the harsh sun. Some of its roots have left the ground, but they are still reaching for the nutrients before they will dry up and ossify, to be snapped off by the next violent storm. It struggles to hold its arms high in a warning, accusatory, showing the limbs that are turning grey and hard, hollowing, as their body abandons them in favour of survival. Plastic hangs both in the maze of twigs and in the fabric of the roots, growing out to knobbly fingers, drained of strength, but pointing in a very last gesture before turning to yet another part of the skeleton.

It leans against the remains of a small hut, advertising poison for the body, but ambrosia for the soul. Its windows are hollowed out, collapsed in on itself over the years of neglect. The stairs leading to the entranceway loll out as a wet and malformed heap of dead tissue, that's given its essence over to the new life congregating at its edges. Broken floorboards and the sagging ceilings frame the empty doorway like a tired grin. It's a remnant of moderated life, following the laws of societal acceptability. It, too, could be considered a warning.

Nobody will pay the park's association for a long time. Not until the hut has given itself to the fungi feeding off the wood holding it upright and it has laid itself down, eyes closed and teeth scattered. Not until the tree is all bones, it's limbs empty and atrophied, and its roots soft, turning into dirt. Not until the crack in the city walls have snapped the plaque in two and the serpent cries directly into the ground, until the heroes have been scattered by the pull of the ivy and the vines have torn the head off the center statue.