/lit/ - Literature

Outside Werther High, the rain-slicked streets are awash the sound of rolling tires. In the rugged mirrored pavement shines the blurred reflection of hues red, yellow and green, from swinging traffic lights hung high in the grey clouds. Damp branches lean against telephone lines dripping coppery petrichor. Roadside woodland conifers abound hills blanketed in beds of decaying brown pine needles. Streams of rainwater splosh down storm drains clogged with sod.

Ludovica-Clerica is a mountainous, upscale suburban township built on an island in the middle of sprawling downtown Santa Catarina that possesses peculiar hippie charm, many homes here having been constructed in the early modern style. Remnants of farms can be found in the more rural areas of the township, particularly around the bordering rivers that flow into the Juan de Fuca strait. Situated in the geographic center of Seattle, Vancouver and Victoria, Santa Catarina is characterized by its relative congestion and urban sprawl, and so Ludovica serves as an oasis in the middle of a concrete desert, not only for residents of Catarina, but for Californians as a whole. The hippie movement is said to have been born, or rather engineered, in these very green mountains as protest against the excesses of the third world war.

Roaming Main Street alone, passing water-logged utility poles and hopping over puddles, Summer reminisces, gazing down Tuesday Lane to her right, a small street where, on Halloween night at the age of eight, she climbed the meandering cobbled steps of a terraced lawn to be greeted, amidst bushes covered in artificial cobwebs, by the sight of a ghostly bride hanging by the neck from a tree, who was draped in white ribbons and illuminated in flickering blacklight. Every Halloween, the cool older kids, one of whom she had a crush on, danced to music that echoed down Main Street. Because she did not and could not know how to dance like them, she was instilled with a tragic sense of yearning that still remains, and also with a fondness for the music that she now finds herself obsessed with.