Here Is

1.

Here is a town placed on the edge of a cliff. At the bottom of the cliff is a lake stretching out into the wasteland beyond. The lake is calm. That is to say, it is as calm as the town. Underneath the smooth, glassy surface there are all manner of predators waiting for someone to fall in.
The town has megaphones attached on all corners of every street. They play religious songs sung by children with innocent voices. They play these songs day and night and the repetition goes unnoticed by the inhabitants of the town.
Each weekend, the youths of the town (which number approximately thirty or so) drive around in rusting cars, veering at old women and trying to scare each other by driving fast and close as if they might crash; they have set up gangs with names like The Scorpions and Machinegun Maniacs. None of the town's children have seen either machineguns or scorpions.

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2.

Here is a city where the drones run up and down the bridge, carrying documents that are important to them and to no-one else. The bridge spans a river of thick, fast-moving water that is the colour of bile. None of the busy workers bother looking down into the mess of the river. If they did, they wouldn't see their reflections and they might even think about throwing themselves in. Or they may think about whether to give their nannies a pay-rise, or whether they should get a nanny in the first place.
A man with a suit made especially for him, tailor-made is what they call it, stands inches away from his glass-fronted office, seven floors up and overlooking the bile-coloured river. From this perspective, the people below take on the same movement as the river – a cross-hatched pattern of flowing rhythm leading in two completely separate directions. In his hand he has a cigarette burning, though it's illegal to smoke in the building.
He puts the cigarette into his wrist and it sizzles and burns before going out.

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3.

Here is a small shack on the outskirts of somewhere. Inside the shack, a man rapes his wife. It is rape, because it is not consented and the wife hates the husband. She screams and claws at his face, but he has made her trim her fingernails in order to prevent any unnecessary damage. She hates her life and her children's lives and is desperate to leave him. When he goes to work in the damaged fields close to the shack, she imagines taking up the baby and the blank expressions of the ones she loves and losing themselves in the world of light and enjoyment.
The question is, where will they go?