Taking Life Seriously

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It is November 21 2011. It's night time, look, it's 4:33 if you want to be petty about it. The small city of Gort sleeps.

Gort's not exactly a city really, more like a town, well a village to be brutally honest. It's one of those places where everyone knows everyone and they're constantly in each others' business. Population 3076, Gort used to be a mining town until the mines dried up a hundred years ago, now it's become a sort of suburb to the city in the north. People live here, but only because the rent is cheap. There are those people from the city who some times move here because they want to live 'in the country' but they get bored fairly soon and move back to wherever they can get a low fat soya frapuchino and a political discussion in which they can pretend to know a whole lot about the culture and economic situation of places they have never been in. Still it's not that bad. The country side is stunning, if you like miles and miles of green fields and hills and black black skies with a thousand million burning stars. But if you're from the city you probably don't. That probably scares you, and the noises cows make while grazing in the dark must evoke in you both a real fear for the safety of the ozone layer and an irrational desire to eat a steak.

Gort does have a few amenities: a big and well stocked public library which is always busy on a Saturday morning, three churches: catholic, protestant and Lutheran, one public school with high school built in, a technical collage, four pubs, two restaurants, five takeaways (three of which are indian food), and a shopping center.

The Visitors shopping center is at the western edge of Gort, so that when it was built, the bus route had to be changed so that it would pass by it. The mall has three book stores, a couple of clothes stores, a comic book shop, a toy shop, a cinema, a food court, a pet store called Puppy Heaven, and the Savemore: 'your complete house, home and outdoor store for all your needs.'

so that's Gort, and it's late at night, and suddenly every single animal at the Puppy Heaven pet store starts howling and scratching at its cage. One parakeet bites the bars until its beak starts bleeding, it continues regardless. A litter of puppies that was kept together in the same box suffocate each other while trying to escape. The macaw lies at the bottom of its cage and refuses to move. One cat manages to open its cage and runs head first into the store's plate glass window. It dies instantly.