Wordzzle 77 - The silent majority

This is my contribution to this week's Wordzzle. Wordzzle is a game in which each week word lists, used to create stories, are given on the blog Views from Raven's Nest. Participating users post their stories on their own blogs.

This is my entry number 21, for Wordzzle week 77.


Ten Word Challenge:

blind panic,
apartment,
fleas,
soap operas,
cajun cooking,
free and easy,
legal,
sangria,
public school,
new

It wasn't a public school, but it was a fenced-in institution. People were put there who had special problems. Very special problems. They were getting a lot of new residents, too. It was not free and easy to get in there, and in many cases not even entirely legal, but many people were put there by concerned family members, moved out of their house and apartments, sometimes with little or no warning.

It wasn't the usual problems or phobias, not fear of dirt or germs or fleas or even Cajun cooking or sangria. Still the people arrived, often in a blind panic. They were difficult cases, too, and some who came never left. Sometimes when a person's favorite soap opera went off the air, there just wasn't much you could do.


Mini Challenge:

class,
calendar,
keeping secrets,
boring,
fashion

I checked the calendar again, but it had no appointments for me. No classes either. I looked at the next week and the next month, and finally at the whole year, but nothing was there anywhere. Unless the calendar was keeping secrets from me (and they sometimes do, boy have I been surprised) it looked like it was going to be one boring year.

I finally started looking at the pictures on it. They were all of fashion models. Well, no wonder, what do they know. With disgust, I put the calendar back on the shelf and picked up another one. Hmm. This one had cats on it. Maybe it would be better. Cats seem to know everything.


Mega challenge:

blind panic,
apartment,
fleas,
soap operas,
cajun cooking,
free and easy,
legal,
sangria,
public school,
new

class,
calendar,
keeping secrets,
boring,
fashion

Walking along, I passed by what used to be a public school. There were no classes on the calendar today, though. The neighborhood had changed, and there weren't enough kids and it was shut down. It was going to be torn down and something new put up, but money had run out, and now it simply lay in ruins, partially demolished.

Some people were camping out in it, probably vagrants. The smells of Cajun cooking drifted toward me. As I got closer, I could see them roasting something over a fire, and they were drinking something that might have been sangria, though it was hard to tell for sure. It looked like they were getting pretty drunk already, though they remained strangely silent. I crossed the street to the other side and continued on.

As I passed some apartments, a dog came out, fleas jumping all over it. I was afraid it might want to transfer some of them to me, but it acted like it was behind an invisible wall, and didn't try to jump up on me.

I passed a store with TVs in the window, heavily discounted. Good luck with that. Everything was reruns now, even soap operas, and it had just gotten too boring for most people. Too depressing, too.

I came up to a supermarket. Its windows were boarded up, but it was still open. A long line of people stood in front of it. The owner was just letting in a few at a time, so he could keep a better eye on them. This was getting common, and I had seen it in other places. Things had gotten to the point that people no longer cared as much what was legal and what was not, and were doing more shoplifting than paying. What they regarded as free and easy, though, the shop owners did not, and so the present setup evolved.

I watched as the owner took in a few people, than put his hand up to indicate that the others had to wait. Some in the front assumed exaggerated pleading postures, but he shook his head. One of the people halfway back along the line leaned out and formed his hand into an imitation of a gun and pretended to shoot at the shop owner. The shop owner pretended to shoot back, and the man in line clutched his chest and went into an overly dramatic death that took several minutes. One of the other people pretended to go into a blind panic, running around and jumping up and down and pointing at the "dead" man. I had seen similar things before, far too many times, but it never seemed to go out of fashion.

A real policeman came by and saw the situation and got into the spirit of things, pointing at the body and looking accusingly at the crowd, finally going up to one person after another, glaring intimidatingly at them. But they were real good at keeping secrets, and no one said anything. I shook my head at what was happening and moved on.

I had hoped that things would get better, but they just kept sliding downhill. I saw this type of stuff over and over, day after day, and the whole structure of the city, and of life in it, was slowly falling apart. Presumably it was the same way elsewhere, too, but it was hard to know these days.

I continued to walk through the silent city, sometimes stepping around invisible walls, sometimes seeing other people do the same. It just seemed to never end. The epidemic itself had largely passed, but the effects remained. The epidemic that would in later generations be called the mime flu.

Nobody called it that now, though, or said anything at all.