2085

A City on a River

By: Robert Villegas

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

We live in a city on a river. Our city is called New America, and our river is the river Styx. We don’t know how the river got this name, but it is a very wide body of water and, they say, on the other side of the river are some very bad people. We have been at war with them all our lives and almost all the news we receive is about the war and how our Supreme Leader is winning it. We give the bodies of our young to fight this war and some never return. They are lost in the greyness on the other side of the river. We never think about losing them because they don’t know their parents, and their parents don’t know them.

Our country is also called New America. It is a wide stretch of land on the coast of what some people call Old America. So, we live in New America, New America. Sometimes we call it NewA for fun.

Our city has tall spires for buildings, but most of them are empty and in ruins since the time the Supreme Leader came to save us and restore order. Some time, long ago, the old leaders decided to make these buildings out of the same-colored rocks, grey and drab. We don’t know why they chose that color, but it makes the city look old and decrepit from a distance.