Little Steeltown

[evieshka]

You dream of a team-building exercise in which you must create a collage of a place called Little Steeltown. The prospect is exciting to you, despite the fact that you arrived late to the team-building excursion (a camping trip) and have no team to work with. Little Steeltown is two blocks from the campsite, so you walk down to the waterfront to take in the sights. Instead of docks, you find scaffolding where aging men sit and watch, and so you also sit and watch, though you are not a man.

The aging part is not something that occurs to you in your dream team-building excursion, where you have no team.

You see that the burly male inhabitants of Little Steeltown earn an honest living by taking passengers out in reed boats, conveying them from one shore to another. They are the subject of much conversation amongst the aging men on the scaffolding; the menfolk have been rowing their reed boats for generations and are among the most trusted people in Little Steeltown.

Every now and then, they rock the boats back and forth in an effort to dump the passengers into the churning, murky water.

It is an entertainment to the aging men on the scaffolding that, should a passenger manage to remain aboard, the men climb from their reed boats, stand on unseen pylons in the water, flip the boats end-over-end, and drown their cargo. Passengers don't realize they can die in the process of traveling from shore to shore.

To you, it may seem safest to allow themselves to be shaken from the reed boats and cast into the polluted river before the drowning starts, but each narrow escape is dismissed by your elderly male companions; it's only a matter of time, they say. Get 'em next time.

Everyone needs the reed boats to get from shore to shore.

None of this is unfamiliar to you. You feel you've seen this before.

You climb back up the scaffolding and pass through the town square.

There are lampposts with flyers advertising televisions shows you watched the day before. The actors are missing persons. The missing persons were last seen in crossing the river in Little Steeltown.

There is no number you can call.

You stop a man in a brown shearling coat and ask about the team-building exercise, and whether it matters if your project is submitted late. He tells you to take your time. Enjoy the sights. Why not go for a boat ride?

You wake.

You reach for your phone and search the vast expanse of the internet for a place called Little Steeltown.

It doesn't exist.

You read the news.

An unarmed black man was shot by uniformed police officers, in broad daylight, in front of witnesses. His hands were up.

You wonder about reed boats and underwater pylons.