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Blue Mud Swamp by Mingyu Wu

I was walking southeast when the city started to appear on the horizon. I saw a metallic sky, perhaps it was dusk, or dawn. I saw a man walking towards me. He was a traveller, like I was, walking away from the city, and as he saw me slowing down my pace, he spoke these words to me:

‘Are you going to the city?’

As I nodded in response, he asked.

‘Don’t you know what is happening out there?’

As I shook my head, he said:

‘Come here and I will tell you.’

We crouched beside the road, and the man pointed at the city.

‘It is said that the cause of all that is…what happens is that things have become more… heavy´, he begun. ‘One day – and here is where the whole story begins – an old lady went to the doctor complaining how her head was so heavy, and the doctor prescribed some herbs and gave it no more thought. It so happened that, not very long after, more patients came with the same complaint, saying that it was as if their heads had increased in weight. At that point, unable to find a cause for this evil, the doctor started to get puzzled. Soon after, people – many of them young – started complaining their body was also heavy, and that it was hard to carry weights. Even walking was hard. For some time hospitals were hectic, until someone thought of weighing people on a scale and confirmed they truly had increased in weight.’

‘From then on, it was not difficult to realize that everything else had also increased in weight’, the man went on. ‘They started to notice that animals moved lazily, and that birds flew less and lower. House’s roofs started to bend – some even fell down – and had to be reinforced; the General’s bronze statue in the main square sunk until the last inscription line on the pedestal was half buried in the turf. Glasses were sliding from the nose bridge and had to be duct-taped to the nape, and the gold earrings stretched the earlobes and holes. Everything was scaled, even earth – as if they knew how much it weighed before and were able to compare – that was becoming harder because it compacted with its own weight, and the seeds were germinating with more difficulty. But that did not cause problems, since people ate less not to overfill their stomachs.’

‘The weather also started changing, it rained very little and it was hotter’, he continued. ‘The sunlight had weakened until days were not quite days. The air became so thick that people were tired from the effort to speak and hear. And breathe. But still worse was the tiredness, which grew with the weight.’

‘Then, a medicine started to circulate. Everyone took it, and still take it, but older people more than the others, since, it is said, older people are the ones who suffer the most because they have more remembrances, and remembrances, even the vaguest ones, are what weighs the most. The medicine makes one forget and lightens the weight off the head. But, as I see it, that is no life, since they forget today the day before. Now all they have to do is to carry day by day their own body weight… and to remain free of things.’

I wanted to know why people did not go into exile, to what he firmly answered:

‘They can’t anymore. They are too heavy to leave. It is said that the cause of all that are the changes in molecular bonding, that everything out there is becoming all the more like salt. They talk of packing… And the philosophers talk about the weight of matter, as if we didn’t already know.’

He paused, looked at the ground and continued:

‘If you ask me…’ – the man gave me a meaningful glance, and starting to walk away, he added – ‘but for us just passing by, there is no danger. It is said that evil needs time to get rooted and distance ends up diluting everything. Go and see.’