The Marigold by Andrew F. Sullivan EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Author: Andrew F. Sullivan
- Language: English
- Genre: Dystopian Science Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Before everything that happened, before the towers, before the site plans,
before the deeds, before the failing sports bar and two-bedroom apartment
above it that often operated like another, more financially successful,
unlicensed sports bar until the police shut it down after that one Polish kid
got strangled with a pair of pink stockings behind the abandoned Shoppers
Drug Mart a block or two south, there were trees here.
Now there was only a hole. A crane perched on the edge, its lights
barely illuminating the dirt below. The stooped shape of a man clambered
down the sloped side of the pit, dragging a heavy burden over the frozen
mud. A short shadow rippled across the dirt as he descended like a lazy bird
of prey. The gardener’s feet knew the way. His breath emerged in tiny
clouds. No wind reached down this far, but the cold stitched itself into
everything it touched. Far above the pit, towers scratched at the lightpolluted sky. Most had undergone the ritual, paid their dues, if not to the
gardener than to someone else with their own take on his faltering, archaic
craft.
With spring, the hole would come to life again, thrumming with sweaty
bodies and hungry machines, but before that happened, it had to be seeded.
An aged protection spell practised since the bad old days. This was what the
gardener was paid to do down here; a pile of bills in an Easton hockey bag
waited for him in a vacant condo across the street. Fives, tens, twenties all
mixed together. The money didn’t exist outside that hockey bag. It floated
in its own reality.
The gardener unrolled the tarp, let its wet contents tumble down into the
low trench at the very edge of the pit. Seventeen or eighteen, the gardener
didn’t know. Male this time. It didn’t matter. Its clothes were burned back in
the ravine. A rough image of a bird was tattooed on a shoulder, yellow and
orange and dead. Fingernails bitten down to scabbed quicks. The gardener
knelt down in the frozen dirt, dug his thick hands into the earth. Stone, ice,
and soil scooped onto the body, a patient process, ensuring the seed was
fully buried. From across the street, The Marigold leered into the pit,
eighty-eight storeys topped with a crown of flickering orange lights, the
sister tower to what was still only a hole.
Finished with his labour, the gardener grabbed the blue tarp that had
carried the heavy seed, wrapping it around his shoulders like a cowl. He
turned to begin the long trek to the surface. He didn’t worry about cameras
catching his face. No sensors this far down, no one tracking his footsteps,
recalibrating the city’s functions. These matters were handled far in
advance. Marigold II was supposed to reach over a hundred storeys when it
was complete, another tower with a golden halo, a shining monument for
some desperate legacy.
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