Corruption of the Night Sky

Corruption of the Night Sky

There used to be such pretty nights when I was younger. Nights that seeded optimism regarding humanity's place in the universe. Piercing stars surrounded by a deep darkness, that made you dream of infinity. The night sky was a window to a different world - one full of miracles, and hope. And if you had a telescope, then you had a portal to teleport yourself into the void. But lately, a lot had changed. 

The atmosphere of the night had become uncomfortable, even hostile. You could hear metallic echoing, like blood streaming in metal pipes. The rain sounded accidental, like the crackling of a broken radio. The sky was pressing down right on ones head, and the stars behind it were being insulted by a toxic orange veil. I had no better explanation for the colour other than that it had been vomited out by a dying animal. The sky was no longer a symbol of hope for humanity, but rather one of pollution, entrapment and rage. 

The village i had grown up in had grown into an enormous city so fast, I could hardly notice the process. Immersed in these nostalgic thoughts, a rush of claustrophobia hit me as i realized how unnatural it really was - It felt like nothing happened in this whole time, except tumorous growth of giant undecorated buildings. My memories of the time before the city were severely limited, and it felt like I had been living in it almost forever. Even while experiencing a single day, the passage of time slowed down significantly. I left my room less and less frequently. 

Meanwhile, people were living the miserable lives of dogs pretending to be human. I had woken up to a brutalistic nightmare, in which humans are nothing but meat. The city had been designed to optimize human wellbeing, but now cages of cement trapped our minds and pipes of metal carried paranoia. Meanwhile, the processes in the buildings and pipes escaped all understanding. In the end it was probably better that I didn't know where the pipes ended, which connected the different anonymous cement blocks. My head felt heavy as thought of it, and images of giant blood filled containers pushed themselves into my brain. Then I was invaded by fantasies of human flesh being flushed down a drain in the middle of a room, followed by hot water rays from pressure washers practically sterilizing the stainless steel floor within seconds. The air was sweet and wet, and low of oxygen. The city treated humanity like a whore and you could smell it. 

My dad worked in one of the city's major facilities for water distribution. He once let me see the giant metal containers and various machinery, which back then seemed quite impressive. These systems were going to level up human wellbeing after all. It all made so much sense back then, until more and more pipes were installed at my family's apartment, and finally, in my mind connectedly, my dad died at work. He had climbed up some ladder to fix a pipe in the facility and climbed inside the pipe, after the flow of fluid had been turned off for his safety during maintenance. For some reason, an unexpected gush of oil swept him down the pipe and into a bigger container, also filled with oil, in which he then drowned. Apparently, people noticed him missing from his spot immediately, found him and pulled him out of the tank. But even after a half hour of resurrection attempts they could not save him. This glimmer of humanity in his death had always seemed strange to me, quite unusual for our world. As my mom explained it, it was a silver lining of humane treatment at the end of his miserable life of mistreatment. My mom had heard of his work accident before me and when she passed the news on to me, I just locked myself into my room for a while. She said that she built made him a little memorial. She painted cross and a goodbye note on a cement wall close to my dad's former workplace, which she then started visiting multiple times a week, always at the same regular times. She didn't use our car parked in the garage downstairs - instead she just walked the half hour to said place, stayed for half an hour, and walked another half hour back home. I never went there myself. At this point, I hardly every left my room. 

The conditions that had my dad have his accident were harsh, and it was no great surprise that it ended how it ended. The work was tiring and dangerous, but the applicants were plenty nonetheless, so only the most industrious were chosen. But working a lot without breaking down wasn't the only requirement. Precision was just as important. Apparently, pipe leaks due to inaccuracies were to be avoided at all cost. "They can cause a whole range of annoying problems. Problems you don't want to have to deal with." - they had told my dad. So the workers had to be careful. They had to be precise. They had to be indestructible. And they had to sacrifice themselves for progress. 

Officially, the pipes were transporting oil and water. The only problem is, that I saw absolutely no reason for them to pierce through the wall seemingly without a pattern, and there being already seven such visible pipes around my house, with the number growing every other week. The recent constructions were meant to deliver these fluids even more efficiently. Indeed, the current water prices in our family had been quite a bit lower than they used to be. But were more pipes really sufficient to explain such a price drop?

The biggest one we had was in the kitchen. It entered from the ceiling in the far right corner of the kitchen, and left again through the ceiling after following it to the left side of the room. Its diameter was around 60 centimeters. My dad had installed it himself actually, during his last day of vacation, and therefore free of charge for us. He said it would be rather dangerous as he would probably have to enter the pipe. I didn't watch him, or even talked to him that day, and the very next day at noon my mom told me that he just had his fatal accident at work. Maybe this coincidence of events further fed my mistrust in this specific pipe. The pipe was grotesque, as if an immense snake had broken through the ceiling and reared its head, before fossilizing while trying to exit head first, back into the ceiling. Our dog didn't like it at first, but seemed to have gotten used to it now. 

I didn't know how much time had passed since dad had died, and I didn't know how many pipes there are already. I could just sense metallic smell filled my nose as I laid half asleep on my bed, dreaming paranoid horrors of flesh and blood. 

"It smells like blood, it sounds like blood. There is blood in the pipes. There is blood in the pipes!" 

I awoke to my mom leaving the appartement to visit dad's memorial. While trying to analyse my dream, I realized that the city was entangling my thoughts on purpose. It was keeping me from figuring out what is really going on in its innards. I had to leave my room to go to the bathroom. On the way there, I glanced into the kitchen and a piece of what I decided must be human flesh on the floor below the big pipe. I ignored it and continued to go to the bathroom. Then I decided it was time for me to leave my apartment, to finally see the world again and get a more clear view on things. I walked down the staircase to the floor below, in which our garage and also an exit from the building was located. Walking towards the garage, I noticed that the huge pipe from our kitchen followed the stairs and entered the garage, and on the way there, constricted progressively. A thought crossed my mind: Something could get stuck there on the way down after entering it upstairs in the kitchen. Again the air smelled metallic and sweet. I opened the door to the garage, our dog had followed me. I walked past my mom, who looked at me in shock, as I caught her in a lie. She was in the process of replacing an oil filled bucket with a new one, in order to prevent the oil dripping from a hole in the pipe from messing up the floor. The pipe leak was not accidental however, but rather an ongoing attempt to clear a 90 kilo blockade that was hindering the flow of liquid inside the metal walls.  Through the opening, an arm and a head of my dad's corpse had already been pulled out of the pipe, with the rest of his body still inside. I walked up to my mom with a slightly displeased face and started helping my mom clear the pipe from the blockade. "Why did you tell me he died at work, you could have just told me that he is stuck in there. I should really know when there are issues with our house pipes.", I mumbled, as my dad's arm dropped on the floor after I had cut it off with an electric saw.