You’re snacking on In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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“Leaving: Smithersfield. Next Stop: Wheelhouse Uncommons.”
The squeaky voice of an engineer rattled through a sequence of bronze pipes and accordion tubes - running like clotheslines along the tram cars - before sallying forth from the cone-horns overhead. The announced Leaving-point little served the lost traveler, since the message only ever came after the tram had begun its paddling, forward motion. Nor was the Next Stop of much aid to riders of the dragon-engine-driven conveyance. The passengers had no say in the tram’s course. No, the main purpose of the squeaky announcements was a kind of revitalizing beating. They swooped over the heads of the masses, who would otherwise have sat through the churning starts and stops of The Dragon Tram without consciousness; blankly staring through weary, half-lidded eyes; letting occasional strings of drool join the muddy grime of the car floor.
Mr. Grey, in contrast to his fellow travelers, never wore an inattentive face; that being one of many expressions he didn’t go in for. Most often he sat with his head angled slightly down, his eyes staring uncompromisingly at the window. The glass usually held enough rivulets of slime and mottled splotches to keep the rare glances of fellow passengers from reflecting on its opaque surface.
But today, circumstance prevented Mr. Grey’s pouring of countenance into his favorite spot of dull glass. Some busybody had taken fancy and rubbed a rustic farmyard landscape into the pane. The glass was clear in the places their fingers had wiped. One round spot meant to represent a huge star afforded Mr. Grey a crystal view. Through it he saw an uncomfortable reflection of himself, the distracting reflections of his fellow transports, and - rolling past - the grim streets of Starharbor.
The engineer with the squeaky voice called out Wheelhouse Uncommons through the brass horns. Three stops to go. Mr. Grey looked around. With no safe spot to rest his glance away from that of others, he waited anxiously. He looked forward to hastening out the sliding tram doors, gliding down some dark city streets, and interring himself in the comfortable solitude of home.
Mr. Grey’s hasty glance along the tram car showed no familiar faces. There was a jaundiced old woman plucking petals from a carnation bouquet and letting them mingle with the grime and grating of the tram floor. There was a stoop dweller pestering a suit-robed businesswoman near the front for treasure. Otherwise, the passengers sat quietly in their seats, inanimate. Mr. Grey had seen Ms. Maysey boarding another car when he’d reached the station. She hadn’t seen him. She and every mouse on her head had worn the same ground-down look of fatigue as every other tram rider. Mr. Grey had taken advantage of her distraction. He’d redirected his steps, and picked a different car.
Mr. Grey felt reasonably safe from any sudden conversational affliction. As an additional precaution, however, he donned his grey earmuffs, and scrunched himself into the corner by the grimy glass. He poured his attention through the abnormally-translucent window.
The Dragon Tram paddled slowly through a shallow canal of tar-like jelly which flooded every street in Starharbor. It propelled itself on dozens of rotating, water wheel axles, churning up gloopy sprays past Mr. Grey’s view. Sometimes the jelly spattered on the elevated sidewalk, where it adhered to a half frozen sleet of the same substance. Pedestrian traffic sometimes grumbled objections at the Tram when the jelly doused them in their walks. These same persons were often people who lived on such streets, and already fouled with a crusty, dark layer of filth. One convenience of the inky aspic was that it washed out, entirely, other stenches which might otherwise have pervaded the city. On the streets of Starharbor, there was only the jelly’s smell of rotting meat.
The Tram had already rolled beyond the city district of the Regional Justice Center. That region of town was unique from most; densely packed with towering skyscrapers and stilt homes, rising high over the fumes and grime of the street. In that part of town, sprawling wheelhouses schemed people out of their hard-worked treasure, with flashing flamelight signs, and promises of dragon hoards. In that part of the city, the streets were comparatively clean; the odors, comparatively pleasant; the background din, contrastingly jovial.
But now, the Tram wriggled through the rest of Starharbor. As he sat with eyes to the glass Mr. Grey confronted - reflected on the dirty, hastily wiped sun in the Dragon Tram window - the true face of the city: a sprawling, polluted rookery. He saw ramshackle huts, mimicking the rats infesting them by huddling together in dense, urban clusters. Sometimes the light of a glowbug jar shone through the cracks in the window boards of these houses. More often they were dark, cold, and forlorn.
Stretching his ears past the splashing and growling of the Dragon Tram, Mr. Grey listened to the industries of the poor. Stoop dwellers, the street-living kin of the one asking for handouts in Mr. Grey’s car, cheered ritualistically each time a sidewalk vent belched a cloud of warm sewer air. Wheelmen catcalled passersby and seduced them into their establishments; rundown Wheelhouses, very distantly related to the affluent attraction of the Justice Center district. Gangs of street wolves barked antagonisms at members of every class until they scattered at the approaching trumpets blown by city bouncers in their high-wheeled carriages. And beyond all these distinct frustrations there was another, newer noise. Something like a grumble, an undercurrent of rising discontent. Not yet audible, but gathering mass from the echoes of the echoes of the suffering.
When he attended his nose, Mr. Grey smelled, obviously, rotting meat.
The stoop dweller in his car had begged halfway down its length when Mr. Grey heard the engineer’s voice through the horns. “Entering: Wheelhouse Uncommons. Next Stop: Milliners Street.” Two stops away. Mr. Grey expected the dweller would reach him before his stop. He thought that if he made himself unapproachable enough, he might still escape conversation.
Wheelhouse Uncommons squatted at variance with its name, as the burgs of cities often do; both in terms of the quality of Wheelhouse establishments, and their number. Wheelhouses and their victims lounged like blooming mold across the length of the sidewalk. Other vulturesque establishments shoved themselves into the free plots that remained. Some of the signs were for the dusk-eyed professionals who hired themselves out as treasure hunters. Reclaimers of lost fortunes, they called themselves: ‘Starharbor Findery and Wealthmaking’, ‘Blackjaw and Slake: Finders for Hire’, ‘The Gold Company: Finders at Law’. Every few blocks Mr. Grey picked out a street enchanter playing music on a hand carved whistle or cobbled set of pans. These performers offered minor enchantments, produced with treasures they collected, and pocketed any surplus. In all fairness to this last class of person, they were usually kind-hearted enchanters. They were only trying to scratch out a bare living. In the whole sample of Wheelhouse Uncommons, these were a rare breed.
The streets began tottering past once more. The dark jelly leapt up with renewed churning from the waterwheels. The brass horns trumpeted the same message as before, with the single change of the word, Entering to Leaving.
For a tock, Mr. Grey thought he saw the bright, dragon engine robe of Jodee Coats moving on the sidewalk in the opposite direction of his own dragon-pulled car. When he leaned forward in his seat for a better view through the grimy window-sun, Mr. Grey saw it was only a tasteless caricature of a Wheelhouse hostess in flamelights of hot amber and ruby.
Mr. Grey relaxed, unconsciously, back into his seat.
This has been In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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