This is another short I wrote a while ago. I went to edit it once and didn’t even bother. After reading it again now, I want your opinions. I have gotten some decent feedback lately on things I had previously decided to scrap. Keep in mind…this is still unedited. It was the second year of the great pestilence, and my family and I had just arrived in London. The plague had decimated our rural towns, and we abandoned our hopes of avoidance. With no where left to run, the city, we hoped, could provide more for us than our local witch-doctors and clergy men. We didn’t know the state of despair in which the city was gripped until we were standing at her doorstep. The church was our only home. Here we’d flock each day alongside the other destitute and dispossessed looking for answers or handouts of any kind. What always greeted us were words of reassurance, and hope, as well as sordid tales of Asia whence death came. My body thus far, hadn’t known desperation until the first days here, and fear crept up my spine like cold winter’s breath. Here and around me I was secured in stance by the tumored and wheezing. My father told me we couldn’t go back, that there was nothing for us. The pestilence had pervaded it’s way throughout the lands and we were left to make our stand behind the cities dying walls. Some people, we would hear in the crowds, crying out that it was god who had done this to us–a modern Gomorrah. We would see these people days later in the circles, arrested by chains, with their motives spelled out in plaques before them. The city would throw it’s rot amongst them and they would soon be gone–taken away or brought upon ill with skin brandishing chlorinic wounds. The city had a large focus on relying on the church for their needs, bleeding and begging on the stairs for survival. Praying Mantises, descending upon the church, cannibalizing each other for recognition. This is how my family survived. We had become beggars. It wasn’t much different from the family of farmers we had once been, still reeling from the famine 40 years prior, we were used to starvation. My grandparents, down through my siblings and me, had made it possible to never split apart, from the land nor each other. We had failed this time–along with the world. Maybe the chained had been right all along. Maybe god had abandoned us too. One day whilst lowering our heads to the fat heartless wealth sent by god to save us all, a man next to me whispered in my ear, “The religions we call false were once regarded as truth. Do not hear these heathens, for god has left this place, if ever he was here.” The weight of this statement bore down on me with the heaviness of all my elders woes. It brought me to my knees. I wanted to grab the man and force him upon the clergy, but the laggard was gone, sucked in by the crowd. That night, lying on the walk, I couldn’t sleep. I was left confused as with the taste of a tart, and I had the nasty pleasure of removing rats from my family’s bags. Deep within me a chord was struck of symmetry. I recognized these rats as the church must have seen it’s people. Keeping the sickly at bay and kicking away those of us who made it too close. We were fodder. In these thoughts I came to the breaking realization that since my family had been here, the church had not given us anything. We received our bread from begging our kin. We drank from the run-off of the freshly mopped stairs. We slept with groups of our starving companions. We buried and burned each other ourselves. My heartstrings bent and begged to break as I looked around at the faces of London. Once glorious and powerful, she was now a city on her knees. Knees that broke and bled for the guidance and good tidings of a gold and silver pedestal–just keeping the rats at bay. God, I was sure of it, would want more for us. Non-sinners, we had been, living justly and never abandoning our folk. We gave what we had not, and took what was given by those of warm heart. What had these men who looked upon us given? What significant apothecaric remedy had they produced? Punishment and closed doors–lies of cleanliness to come in the form of God above, washing over us in a wave. I wanted that wave to come and wash away their wealth. I wanted it to come and take their breath from their lungs. I walked along that night, inherently dejected, leaving my family’s side for moments or less. I pondered the thoughts that tugged so violently on my soul, willing my hearts vows to change. I came upon the church, lit only by the funeral pyres and I wept. I wept for the inability of man. I wept for the absence of help in staggering heaps of unwanted disaster gripping the world in pain–squeezing out the bugs. No longer would I be these rats. No longer would they kick us away. With God on my side, or whatever it may be. I will make them see. With doors open as with caring arms, they shall accept our plight and take upon the duties of our lord. The clergy must be made to weep for it’s people once again. Sitting amongst the funeral pyres, I bowed my head in prayer. Never again was I to bruise my knees on the un-wanting stairs of the cathedral. The fire had become my priest, and I watched my prayers float to the heavens. A medium of my own to will my words to god, hopefully I could share. I rested my words with the bodies of my neighbors. Lungs in spirit carried my replicate voice above, and below there was none to kick us down. I became my voice–and London, soon spoke with me.