City on the Hill

Renee leans her hair against the glass and watches as dark green flashes by outside the train’s window. Her elder brother sits beside her, holding their luggage in his lap, beads of sweat clinging to his temples.

            Every other seat is occupied by a figure, slim and sharp and still. Each wears a grey double-breasted suit and holds a newspaper aloft, over their face. They do not turn pages, though, and they do not read.

            Silence. The air, the train is silence. Renee turns her head to inspect the quiet men from behind long lashes and an uneasy fear prickles her stomach. Something mysterious lies behind those rigid rows of open newspapers, above the crisp jacket collars. There are not human heads with human eyes and human brains, but depth and darkness, shadow and scales. There is something dark, something sinister, reptilian, monstrous. Renee feels like she should speak, should release her unease into the insulating silence and shred it to pieces.

She blinks and once again rests her head against the window and watches the dense dark-green fall endlessly behind them. Her brother is deteriorating quickly and they need to get to the city as soon as possible but she knows it will never end, knows they are getting no closer to the city on the hill. It still comforts her to see the trunks and leaves and shadows fly by.

            The train is stopped. Though forest is still visible through the window and the city remains a little circle of grey buildings nestled into a hillside far in the distance, Renee and her brother rise, the only ones to do so. The men-that-are-not-men do not move. They do not turn pages and they do not read. Renee and her brother heft their luggage and awkwardly sidle down the aisle. She is nervous to see what is behind the newspapers, but somehow she never catches a glimpse, though at one point she thinks she sees a flash of shiny green scales.

            Renée steps forward and looks behind her. Her brother is gone. The train is far away, streaking up the hill to the city.

She turns around again to confront the forest. A woman, short and middle-aged, watches from the trees with silver eyes. She does not speak and feels familiar.

Without a word or a movement, the silver-eyed woman signals and men whose faces Renee can’t quite make out emerge behind her and she is herded forward. As she moves, she realizes two wire fences in parallel rise from the dirt, forming a kind of metal corridor through the trees.  She hesitates, stepping backwards, trying to get to her brother or the train but many pairs of hands grab her, nudging her through. A wire door shuts behind her with a clang.

She begins to walk through the caged passageway, the faceless guards goading her forward.

“Please,” she says without slowing her pace, “please. I need to go back. Maybe I can still catch the train, maybe my brother is still there, maybe he’s not sick, maybe…”

Neither the guards nor the silver-eyed woman nor the forest nor the fences respond and Renee continues uninterrupted down the long path, a never-ending strip of brown earth and leaves that extends far into the gloom. The wire fences on either side move steadily past her, unbroken, rising until they disappear into the deep foliage that blocks the sky and sun. 

She does not know how long she walks but her feet seem to have been crunching crunching crunching the same stretch of ground for a long, long time, the path glowing ever in front and behind. 

At some point the fences become short, rising only to her waist. Soon after, a quiet, muted murmuring comes swirling along the path out of the mist and murk of the forest, a mixture of many voices that seem almost familiar but do not comfort her. She comes upon groups of young people talking and lurking within the confines of the fences. Slightly sheepish and unnerved, Renee approaches and weaves through them, settling herself against one of the fences.

After a while she gets antsy, ready to leave, to explore, to take action. She needs to get out, to get to where she needs to go.     

“Guys, let’s try get out of here,” she says to a nearby laughing group, her voice almost a whisper, “There must be some way to leave...”

They look at her with strange, silent smiles. One tells a joke and shows off for the others and they all turn away and laugh and talk.

She moves to a different pair of girls, ones whose faces she seems to remember. “Come on,” she urges, “what’s stopping us from just leaving, from just hopping this fence and walking away? We might as well try it…”

The girls stare at her for a moment. “Yeah,” they say in unison. They turn back towards each other, a hint of distaste in their eyes.

Renee retreats sinks into the shadows by the fence.

For a long time she stays there.

Mostly she stares, either at the contented faces or beyond the wires, into the darkness behind the tree trunks where a pair of silver eyes remains ever watchful. But she remains anxious, ready to act, to leave and her watching is punctuated by fevered attempts to team with the others and escape, to get to the city waiting for her at the top of the hill. They never quite seem to understand. Their only responses are empty smiles and silence.

Time melts in with the shadows. The number of people corralled between the wire corridors never seems to diminish, though every now and then a group escapes. Renee never seems to see them leave until they are already dancing through the trees, disappearing like phantoms into the shadows, cocky smiles pulling at their lips.