Member-only story
Utopia [Short Fiction]
Living in a perfect world
You’d never known anything different. Oh, life was very different before it happened, the old ones say. But you were born afterwards. This was all you had ever known.
It was better now, everything was perfect. Utopia, they’d called it. It certainly was pretty, you think, trailing your fingers along the perfectly-manicured hedges that line the clean, white-washed buildings. Never used to see clean white walls, always ugly graffiti scrawled over them. Graffiti. Such a strange word, a strange concept. Why would you scribble your initials on a perfectly good piece of wall? Why would you want to leave your mark anywhere, when you could just fade into the grey, just another person walking by. Why indeed.
You turn into a brightly lit path, lined with cheerful plastic flowers. It’s a useful shortcut. Oh, do you remember those alleyways? They were awful, all gloomy and full of shadows, criminals lurking at every corner. Yes, these were much more pleasant. All bright and cheery, just like everything else in Utopia.
The shouts of a group of teens playing with a ball catch your attention. Of course, they aren’t shouting too loudly, that would bother some of the other citizens of Utopia. You remember well those lessons back in first grade, about acceptable sound levels. Of course you do, everyone…
