The Grey Scrubbers: A Story
The pale flecks littering the streets, (from a wary eye suspended aloft), pushed forth in dutiful strides as the tailored head kept dutiful watch. Their small hand-rags rotated endlessly, their lungs riddled with the dust they dispersed. Every inch of the city-scape was wiped, polished and left glistening in all of its pallid luster at the end of each day. At night, they returned to their boxes, their heads deflated, their wounds untended. In the mornings they shuffled to the square and surrounded the onyx idol of the tailored head, dancing to and fro in three widening circles. Clockwise, counter-clockwise and back again, twirling all the while. They did not know why they carried out this ritual. They knew only what they had been birthed into, and for them this sufficed, as routine was foremost. Not one of them dared to neglect tradition. Until, on one unforeseen day, the tailored head returned, hovering above the ashen-hued expanse of their city and silently rotating (always clockwise) for days on end, so that they were compelled to gather about it indefinitely.
For weeks, they camped around it in rigid obeisance, for the many prophecies inherited from ages long past had all spoken of such a miraculous time as this, and so they gave witness to its repetitive undulations with pious awe. By day they would perform their rhythmic rite, rotating in conjunction with the expressionless head. By night, they froze, futilely huddled against one another to stave off the bitter cold. The children and elderly passed first, from illness and starvation, whilst the remaining workers grew hysterical, unsure of the reasoning behind this sudden admonishment from on high. They now screamed daily at the tailored head; pleading cries, wordless wails and mournful entreaties. And yet, the head’s pitiless silence was left unbroken as more and more of its servants wasted away.
On the evening of the last day, there were only four members of the population left. Emaciated, stilted in gait, and hardly able to draw breath, they clung to life with a ferocious virility of will, or perhaps it was merely stubborn despondence, molded from vaporous discontent to the indomitable solidity of malefic apathy by years spent consumed with the scrubbing of thousands of grey and featureless walls. On this final day, the group looked to one another, speaking in silence, meeting eyes and nodding heads. Without words, and after only a few minutes of deliberation, a decision was made among them. The four of them left the tailored head to its endless dance, thereby violating the sacred contentions of generations immemorial. Such a crime was unforgivable, and yet nobody holding authoritative status remained alive to punish them for their perpetration. They traveled as far as their enfeebled frames would allow, leaving the now empty city and its malevolently placid god far behind them.
Bereft of subjects, the tailored head’s rotations began to slow. It then abruptly fell from its suspension and hurtled downward, crashing into the concrete, eliciting a prodigious expulsion of stone and dust that could be seen for miles around. There, wedged into the earth, it would lay dormant for years in the ruins of its vast and senseless shrine, its machinations deprived of their sacramental collusion with the caste of the working compliant. Until, that is, the day came when the emancipated peoples, living scattered among the wilds in relative serenity, looked up into the sky once again and drew the cyclical conclusion that its vast expanse promised no indication of grand meaning, and no sign of great purpose. They would look up, and realize that they were alone. And, as that loneliness took root, they would forget the miles of grey walls to which they were once bound. They would yearn for the city and there, always there, the tailored head would be waiting, eternally driven to begin its rotations anew.
