The field used to be a prairie. Native plants grew before and after wild fires grew rampant to naturally select the weeds from the local. Wildlife occurred, flocking to the marshes, swimming down the streams and prancing through the tall grass left untrimmed. Each year the process repeated itself, giving each living thing a determined path to take each maturation period. The fields grew and push the boundaries of survival. Population grew, variation grew, age grew too.
Then the lines begin to take from the land. It started with just dirt creating partitions in the grass. Separating one side of the field from the other. Then another path would intersect, creating segregation between the fields. Nature was getting approached upon and a species unlike their own started plotting the land. This was for them, this for their friends, that for their family. The growth of the field couldn't sustain and it started looking inwards. The plants condensed and other just packed up and left. They let their seeds fall victim to the wind to find remaining fields.
The field made a decision. Other then letting their byproduct leave their community, they needed to condense. The outskirts of their land was being used elsewhere away from their discretion. The snakes had to live next to the rats nest and not overcome the pressure to deplete all their resources. Each part had a significance, it was an ecosystem. The closer they all lived, next to their enemies, laying against the irritable, walking from their young, the more variation sprouted. Adaptation made the animals specificy their purpose. The ducks had to start leaving and only came back home during vacations or when the water was warm enough. The bird followed. The snakes had to dig holes and hide from the environment that they once were a part of. Once scales were red and blue but now just shades of green.
The area started to become more conglomerated. Not only were individual settlers were coming over but whole communities. They were heading out west to free land just bought from Napolean. The land that once remained safe now was a place of democratic capitalism. Foreign plants were being forced into the ground, being worked by foreigners, that were separating the natives from each other. The little blue stem had to move east while the sedge left for the northland. These non-native plants became agriculture, not particularly for the community, but most importantly, for the grain stock exchange in Chicago where they could sell it around the country.
These new settlers pledged for a train station that would help them visit the exchange and place bets on future prices for their crops. Once the train station was placed, the suburbs were created. The surrounded area became convoluted with summer homes and families looking for a quieter neighborhood then the booming city landscape that was ever-changing. Just like the burn that kept out the weeds and evasive plants that cycled once a year in the prairies, the same occurred in Chicago. The wooden infrastructures, the buildings off of buildings, closely stacked on and off one another were swept away in ashes.
More and more left, leaving the city for castaways and the poor. The field wasn't a field anymore but a park. The area wasn't left for salvation but because it was too hard to be built on. The soil was too soft from it's state of being a wetland and the terrain surrounding the field was hilly and bumpy. The dirt roads quickly became pavement, cemented into the ground underneath like a bonding agent. These will be here forever, first just single lane, then suicide lanes, until four lane highways emerge letting the settlers quickly spread as soon as they look at a compass and an atlas.
After the land was divided up between the vacationers and the new locals, the remaining field stood firm. Since it was open, respectfully away from the humans but close enough for revenue, corporations started cowering the area. They looked at the dirt, checked the trees for tags, and even dug far enough to see what was in the mantle.
The neighbors peaked from their fences, the immigrants were sweating in the tall grass trying to rinse their faces in the bellowing creek, and the ground was being mixed from bottom to top and placed willynilly. The fertile soil left replaced with pipes and steam rusted machinery churning through the plains until the land was deemed useless. Only the wild grass growing over the working immigrants heads could hide the refutable damages. The field lay enclosed, surrounded by the tormentors, looking out their backyards at a barren mass left unnamed.
Until things changed, a century after the arrival of settlers to the region. The government intervened and started securing property to be allocated to the preservation of the natural beauty of the areas. The beauty that subsidized the area for millenia, the was left untouched by the inhabitants before the settlers, the nomads just strode through, while the settlers struck down. The barren mass, the remained field now shriveled to a tenth of the degree of what it was, is now being propagated and protected just right after profit was marginalized from the underground resources. Trails were pathed around the creek and through the forests. The architecture left, old cabins withering away from shallow abandonment, windmills left upright only for the hikers to watch spin and spin. Nature dwindled down to a low that is now average. The only inhabitants are wanderers, natures nomads.
***
Gravel covers the immensive lot. After it sits, then pavement is poured evenly on top of the gravel. Each rock that formed the gravel is now smothered with a hot surfacer to allow for a steady park. As soon as the pavement becomes poured, it's already getting pressed as tightly as it can into the gravel and, into the level below the rocks, into the earth. This is repeated until the 100 yard by 50 yard area is complete. That task takes a good weathered weekend to be completed. It sits and stays flat for decades until the retail location is moved down the road into a friendlier, modern design.
The building now looks like a rectangle from the clouds. From a far it just looks like a twenty foot walled behemoth. From an outsider (one that has never seen a retail store), they would think this was a warehouse. To a person that isn't aware of a warehouse, it would just look like an un-needed amount of space for anything but a cult's living facility. But this is where we shop and do plenty of other things that have nothing to do with shopping. You can never be closer to a stranger then parking next to five of them in a parking lot.
There are thirteen yellow longitudinal lines all branded with a corresponding letter from the alphabet. Each line has twenty five latitudinal lines intersecting them. This gives each row 50 parking spots per row and 650 places to park throughout the whole lot. These lines eventually needed to be repainted one row at a time every two years. The yellow begins to get ripped away by hot rubber. The flourescent element given to each paint stripe begins to fade due to half life and night/day. Seagulls when hungry enough will peck at the paint as if it was tape as if either one was edible under any circumstance. These seagulls eventually fly into spinning mechanical windmills that provide electricity. The electricity makes the steel giant hum which puts the community surrounding these benefactors in a dual state; one loving the hum that puts them to sleep like a lullaby being spoken through your grandmother's mouth after chocolate chip cookies and milk or they hate the hum like the resonance sound of a hundred fluorescent light bulbs that have no power switch nearby. The bulbs are engineered to burn out while off, during the day, to not inconvenience the slew that speed through during the covenant third shift.
A crew with nothing better to do, the less hygienic, the workers clueless to the encompassing punishment of slacking throughout the night. Vitamin C is given by the sun but the moon absorbs yours. Watching the stars wink at you and leave horizons over the time of a few construction seasons. No shirts tucked in, the slip under the easel of peoples, that can never leave their ever-enclosed space of sleep, since their time is of the night and the world runs off the sun and it's easy to see navigability. It's split between loners who need money for a recreational bathtub mix of narcotics to shade the sun coming through the blindless window, the family-goers working around their significant other's work schedule to nap with the kids as they wonder what their mother does that's needs to be done while everyone is busily sleeping.
Customers bringing packs of sleepless similiars, howling as they grab for moonpies, as they stare waiting to shop for that necessity of a post-midnight snack frozen pizza combo brownie pack only sold in select, delicate markets. If organics are sold, calories are burned, to consume the high grade, complex molecular make-up of the binge worthy tasty mix of meats and pre-packaged, self-replicating foodstuffs.
The one's still taking the trail from wetland to grossly oversized consumption headquarters are vagrants and volunteers. The vagrants walk along the highway interstate known by their odd numbers. They pass by tall grass as a means to evaluate wind direction to circumvent their caloric intake. Watching retail mass and parking lot turmoil pass, then empty lots still looking for competitive edge, onto strip malls littered between these coves, finally finding the place that serves the cheapest coffee with a place to meet and greet and most importantly seat. Finding others just like them, lost in the abandonment of steady jobs and fruitless responsibility. The previous yesterday was just like the present. After greetings they studied laborlessly at the local library's computer screens trying to find the next neighborhood to squat at. One of the loners got taken up by a raccoon family but he was unaware that he was actually talking about a opossum tribe. They all toothlessly grin and rest their heads on the nearest surface to succumb to a sailor's sleep.
Then, while the vagrants go for a stroll to the next hospitable business, the volunteers come out of the estranged spectrum. The one's that need to spend their time in idle find the necessity of their needs far outweighs their civil duty as wholesale citizens. Most without families, the lapluster soul found love in the family of ecosystem, and already capitalistically retired. They hobble around on their found canes out in the tall grass looking through bird houses and snake dens and counting the numbers. Watching the youth that nostalgically was diverse seriously plummet from the hungry and opportunists.
Finally the land was sold, changing hands from government to corporation, cuffed sleeves interacting, to the one promising to do the least. Protection is just a word uttered from the new land owners to the community. The one's that breath the sacred of native want to know how our heritage will stay in the culture, removed farther from
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