Day 427

Friday was important for the whole town - vital for some.
Friday was market day.
The main street was lined on both sides with vendors and the majority of the townsfolk.
Shame the once brightly coloured marquees were now coated in an insipid grey dust.

Some blamed the heavy traffic on the surrounding roads, both high overpasses and the
one that ran down the middle of the main market area.
Others blamed the constant grey sky, the town was well known as the cloudiest around.
A select few even claimed it was a curse, that eventually the whole town would be grey.

They weren't too far off either, the grey dust began to coat more than just the marquees.
Everyone knew that it tainted the food but it was still all that some people had.
Can you imagine strawberries the size of golf balls, grey as fresh steel yet sweet as air.
Not the air you breathed around the market, the air you heard in stories.

Market air smelt like sweat and grime and engines running their last.
Most of the town carried that same smell, could it be the low valley lack of wind?
Nobody had any real answers, only maybes and guesses and possibilities.
They couldn't explain how colours seemed to all fade so quickly in town.

It started small, grey marquees and grey tainted food but it soon moved on.
Even the brightest clothing was dulled within a week and near grey by a month.
But the people there had more to worry about, summer was ending.
Cold weather brought with it a brutal cough, the kind that left blood on your tissues.

It was a local phenomenon but that didn't stop the townsfolk from trying to cure it.
Some even left for the winter, the whole place went dead quiet, even the market shrunk.
It never seemed to kill though, just weaken, made you sluggish and made your skin greyer.
The coughing season used to be just winter but now it began as early as spring's end.