newsfelch

Slowly, carefully and only when the time is right for each household and family individually, this great city is returning to normality. Piece by weary piece, communities are rebuilding their shattered existence after the events of the last fortnight.
As I travelled earlier today, from the south of town up to the affluent districts in the north, through the desolated streets passing deserted shops and restaurants desperate for business and for this thriving capital city to return to something like normality, the evidence was all around me.

Almost every home has at least one spindly corpse outside, many not even offered the dignity of a plastic sheet or refuse sack, left exposed to the elements and to the dogs. In some streets the carcasses are piled three or four high, arranged in some macabre order, top to bottom, dancing the jive of death, limbs bare to the elements, twisted at absurd angles, stark and skeletal.

And now, two weeks on, the people are beginning to ask when all this will end. How much longer for those now returning to work, desperately trying to rebuild their businesses, having to pick there way through the bodies as they crave the normality that was once theirs? Why, they are asking have the authorities done so little, in many areas even the most rudimentary collection is yet to take place.
Nobody was available for comment when I contacted officials earlier today. On the phone they'll tell you it's not their problem, they'll pass you onto to another department, you might as well try and talk to Father Christmas!

It's clear tonight, that some communities are beginning to organise themselves, gathering up the cadavers and transporting them to large communal tips in their 4X4 trucks and wagons, while the poor simply pile them up and burn them, standing around gazing at the flames, others just stare from closed windows at the decomposing piles in the street.
From outside have come calls for better planning, a deal more preparation and in today's age of civic planning a pre-prepared clean up operation. It should be a mere formality, at this time of year, for extra collections after the festive period, to get Christmas trees off our streets.