Into the depths and the darkness we will go, It’s a hard life out of sight but it’s all we ever know.

Underneath the world you know, lives a group of people you’ve never even met.

You might have passed them on the street once or twice and never known it, their faces covered with old rags. You might even have caught one sneaking away, slinking back into their underworld as if they’d never surfaced at all.

But you haven’t walked down their dripping hallways, you haven’t seen their narrow, filth-covered caverns or their dirty subterranean streets.

Words…. (Photo credit: jah~)

Inside these catacombs of mystery, one adult from this strange race of people sitsin a small space on a cardboard box filled with magazines. She holds one of the old magazines in her hands, her eyes scanning the words from left to right. with a fascination beyond the scope of her fellow under-dwellers.

Words, wonderful words.

Words of science.

Words of poetry

Even the boring ones were interesting just because they were words.

She didn’t know quite how she’d pieced them together, the string of meanings, the order and shape of them. No one had taught her how to do it. It had just been a pattern that she’d looked at for a long time that, one day, had made sense.

Once I went to the surface and saw more of them. I watched and listened to people ordering food from the takeaway stalls to see if I was right about their meanings and I was!

But what does it mean? What does it change for her? She’s a ground-dweller, a person of the underground. Her job is to work in the sewer slums to keep the fires of the world above lit.

We work for the rich people, to keep them warm. We exist to serve them.

She knew that there was no real place or purpose for the revelation in her life. Just as she knew that a million revolutions would never change the world above.

Sewer (Photo credit: hollykl (Trying to catch up…))

The nature of humans is immovable, like stone wrapped in cement. You can paint it any colour you like but it’s still the same underneath.

Still, the words were there now. They moved in her head, in her soul even, like they’d been there from the start.

The world is still the same though. But it wasn’t, not really. Sat there she was just one person in one tiny room amongst a maze of thousands. And above there were even more. But, still she sat reading, just for the sake of it, taking in every picture, every line of prose, every piece of detailed instruction just because she could.