Peach Enters the Emerging Writer's Festival Competition

Travellers in search of El Dorado or Atlantis must listen attentively to the natives, who tell of a city without a past – where the people are too busy with the present to stop and look over their shoulders. They say that if you head out beyond the mountains, following the great dirty river that winds its way past well-kept vineyards, you will come across a city that settles on the horizon like a mirage. And no matter how close you get, it always remains there, just out of reach – even as you wander its many grey laneways the city seems unreal to you.

The city is built in such a way that you lose all perspective. Every street seems to head straight on without interruption nor incline nor decline until it passes beyond your vision. Such a flat city causes many travellers to lose their heads, the natives say. They spend many hours underground, throwing their money at polite well-dressed staff who don’t wear watches. The travellers forget the time, their families, their homes across the sea.

To say that the people of this city love their sport is an understatement. They bump and jostle each other on the wide, flat streets with such ferocity that they have little time for love, or politics.

It is a city constantly under construction. Its citizens reinvent their surroundings at every opportunity. The natives will point to themselves as examples, and the traveller sees them transform before their own eyes – noble savages to helpless primitives to national hero to alcoholic. The people welcome travellers because their own ears are already too much abused by tales of glory, discovery and liveability. The city would die if not for the constant influx of travellers who believed in the promise of the mirage they saw nestling on the bay in the distance. It is a city of dreamers.

Secretly, the city realises its own inadequacy. The people know that their fashion is too grey, their laneways too wide and their love too suburban.

Secretly, they hope for an event that will finally put them on the map. (Or at least on a T-shirt).