*Wordcount: 488 words.
A glimmering golden sun breaks over the horizon, chasing away the shadows of night once and for all. People are waking up and seeing to their morning routines, while some have been up for hours and some still will only awake hours later. Some of them haven’t even slept, out of boisterous fun or gripping anxiety or numbing pain.
All of them do what they normally do, or try something new. A city that buzzes with activity, resembling a hive the further away you are when you look at it.
A hive filled with intelligent insects that flit from building to building, too busy doing nothing to notice the golden light that now bathes them.
As the sun brings light, so does it bring warmth. As the day goes on, the night-chill is cooked away.
A woman, well-dressed for a reliable office job, makes her way through the city. She finds a moment to stop, and look around her. At the light of the sun, at the people living their lives around her, at the cars and busses and traffic lights and towering buildings and stretches of tarmac.
At the grass forcing its way into a crack in the pavement, and at the people that trod it on their way to live.
A man, who looks like he’s been down on his luck for a while, makes a dodgy deal behind an alley. The drugs help; at least that’s how he sees it. Besides, there’s not much else for him to do.
He can barely afford what he needs.
The day winds down, the afternoon sunlight taking on lazy properties, but still unable to slow the hustle of the city. It bustles and throbs with activity, people on breaks or going home. Some of them are even out to enjoy the day, and a local park offers respite.
The park is small, relatively speaking; dwarfed by the concrete and steel industrialisation that wraps around it.
A well-dressed woman walks through the park, enjoying the day. She left work early, feeling ill, and sought out what she knew she needed. An oasis, glittering and green, so different from the world she immerses herself in every day.
A dodgy man stumbles through the park, a desperate glint behind weathered eyes.
The sun is now beginning to set. Taking away the light it brought with it, the shadows grow and an evening chill seeps into the air.
Darkness covers the park and the city-hive, and people have retreated to their homes or gone out to clubs or gone to dinner with loved ones.
A dodgy man, clutching a purse speckled with red, makes his way out of the park, looking around with paranoia.
A well-dressed woman lies, bleeding, on a park bench. The light has gone out of her eyes, and her purse is gone. A few stab-wounds are visible against the black of her clothes.
The sun rises once more.
Pudgeon's Playground 