Imbalance

The Engineer wiped off another trickle of sweat, as it prepared itself for the final plunge at the end of its precipitous journey from behind the left earlobe and through the grizzled, sun burnt cheek, off the cleft in his double chin. The sun beat down on the earth with a vengeance that belied the paternal fondness that had been incessantly attributed to it, since the beginning of documented time. For the umpteenth time that day, he muttered under his breath in richly decorated dialect, his antagonism for the superordinate who had woken him up from his treasured Sunday afternoon siesta and dragged him onsite to oversee the founding of a particularly critical structure in the highrise.

The structure, which would eventually stand parallel with the ground and support upon itself, an intricately textured pattern of multi colored glass, hung at a grotesque angle from the crane that would, in time, set it dutifully upon its rightful place. The Engineer looked at it, gauged the plentiful hours, as yet unconsumed, before the task would be accomplished with a satisfactory measure of impeccability, and let out an audible sigh. Just at that moment, the workwoman came up to him.

He appraised the dark, frail, unkempt thirty-ish woman with a faint feeling of distaste, as she informed him, in a high pitched, disjointed amalgamation of syllables, about the sickness of her seven-year old and the consequent need for an early return home. The Engineer heard her babble with scarcely veiled cynicism, snorted, and summarily dismissed the plea. The workwoman went back to her work, shrieking at the unjust servitude that plagued her and her kind in general.

Furious, but helpless, she picked up an oversized vessel, filled with broken, useless bricks, hauled it onto her head with both hands and set off towards the dumping ground. Her plea, unlike several other occasions, had been truthful, and the rejection of it was taken as another indication of her forsaken existence on the planet. In short, quick steps, stomping her disgust on the ground with every footfall, she covered the few dozen meters that took her to the heap of rejected objects that lay strewn tragically in a vast expanse of wastage. Once there, she carefully lowered the vessel from her head and dumped the contents onto the ground with all the hatred that was pent up inside her

The bricks crashed onto a bunch of budding Petunias, aberrations in the desolation, crushing the life out of them.