Gorgias

I stopped walking because I saw the signs. I don’t normally stop for posters in the street, considering they’re mostly 1) ugly, 2) boring and 3) for things I don’t care about. So, I stopped. A stretch of pink home-printed posters, a solid four metres wide and three metres tall, faced the park that’s just around my corner. This wasn’t a popular spot for hanging posters, considering the real city centre stops exactly two blocks, being five buildings, away, I mean, there aren’t even billboards here anymore, so the surprise was partly because of their audacity and partly because it was four by three of hot pink.

The posters were pretty clear in their message. There was to be a flea market in the very park I normally don’t walk through because I feel it’s filled to the brim with homeless guys eating things I don’t even want to look at and whores shooting heroin up their veins in order to cope. I may have frowned. So there has to be a “safe” spot there, I figured. It was pretty well-designed for a home-printed poster. They didn’t use the cliché fonts you see on children’s parties’ invitations, there was a reasonable amount of editing done—evidenced by the solid tone of voice—, not a single clip art item, even. I actually began to warm up for the flea market and decided to remember it. I was on my way to the city centre, that part of the city with the billboards, and on a whim I went through the park to get there. The park abutted a major road and I would be only a little bit slower and could try and check out whether there really was such a “safe” place as advertised. Under a tree, a whore was shooting heroin up her veins.