1. I Remember Erewhon


    Date: 9/29/2015, Categories: Mature, Author: BradleyStoke, Rating: 2, Source: LushStories

    I remember Erewhon. I remember the crenelated turrets, towers and spires overshadowing a city of unheralded bends and unexpected corners and alleyways. I remember the cobbled streets, the gaslit esplanades, the flint-studded churches, the winding river, and the expansive city square. I also remember the soaring modern edifices that truly scraped the sky and which reflected one on another; the multi-lane highways—sometimes slow and congested, occasionally empty and open, and most often dense with speeding sports cars—that radiated outwards in ever-widening rings from the city’s hub alongside elegant apartments, decrepit slums, shadowy lanes illuminated by brightly-lit curtained windows, and towards endless rows of suburban streets dotted with bus-stops, corner shops and red post boxes. And weaving about the city, snaking beside the roads, diving through the tall buildings, above crossroads and emerging from and disappearing into mysterious dark tunnels of promise and dread, were railway lines on which chuffed steam trains and sped electric trains, diesel trains and trains levitated by the magic of magnetism several centimetres above the rails. This spaghetti of railway track transported me and everyone else who chose to board the train past advertisement hoardings, above dark sinister streets, beside monotonous rows of semi-detached and mock-Tudor suburban houses, beneath rivers and through ornate, wooded and open-lawn parkland that were as integral to Erewhon’s enchanted ...
    appeal as anything on the streets. And it is to the parks—as much as to the shopping malls, the cavernous railways stations, the motorway intersections and the overarching concrete bridges—that my thoughts so often return. When I was a young boy, racing about with my red toy balloon, blue rucksack and silver sneakers, it was Erewhon’s parks that were most important to me. Only the zoo, the museum and the red-and-yellow fast food outlets offered competition to the attraction of the varied and always spacious parks that were never far from the perambulations of a boy whose greatest source of pleasure was to climb the steps and then descend the metal slope of the park’s slides. But roundabouts, swings and see-saws were only a few of the distractions on offer at Erewhon’s extensive parkland. There were hedges, paths, fences and fields stretching in every direction: from the imposing gates that threatened to close at some mysterious mythical hour to the bandstands that sometimes presented the latest pop sensation to a remarkably small audience. And onwards to statues of commanding and impressive figures of authority of which the most disturbing feature was that none of the men these statues represented, in a sense barely understood at all by me, were any longer living: in fact they were in a state of incomprehensible non-being known as death. And amongst these statues—some with a noble gaze set to a far distant horizon, some abstract in form and at all times both pregnant with and ...
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