The Hill

The fire has gone out. The plumes of smoke that once tapered into the sky are gone now. Only a lone stack remains, like an abandoned candle blown out by the wind.

And all the men that stand on the hill sip champagne and clap one another on the backs. They are victorious this afternoon. Their long struggle for environmental reforms ending victorious at last. They smoke cigars and the ashes fall over browning grass.

 There was life here once. It wasn’t green and growing and foliage and deer and birds. But it was life.

Families spent afternoons on this hill, watching the smoke rise, proud of their fathers who made their afternoon possible. Teenagers spent evenings on this hill, drinking beer under the distant glow of the flames. First kiss beneath the smoldering sky.

People were married here.

Now the grass cracks underfoot. There haven’t been families on this hill in years. There hasn’t been work beneath the smokestacks for a family to live on. The town beneath this hill was once the distant fantasy of the far away dreamers. Cars traveled to and from the flames constantly like moths with a purpose. Mothers walked their children to the store. Dads lined up outside stores on Christmas Eve for last minute presents.

Nothing travels those streets anymore.

The fire has been dying for years now. Lobbyists and politicians have been demanded it be extinguished. It bothered them. A rustic remembrance of an outdated economic model. It wasn’t the need to cut costs, they said. It was public health, they said.

The fire had killed the memories upon the hill. The dream was burned away from the inside, not poisoned from without.

A single father stood in his old home beneath the hill. The fire had gone out and with it gone, so went his parent’s home. They had bought the house brand new so that future generations could have a place to live. It had lasted one and a half.

Upon the hill there were no more families. There was only the hollow victory of a hollow battle that meant nothing for anyone. The men in their suits had no plans for that old, blown out candle.

The sun dips beneath the horizon and for the first time in many years the hill is dark. The people beneath the hill muddle about their homes to salvage former lives, while the men in suits leave their cigars behind, a miniaturized memorial of what they have extinguished.

The fire has gone out.