"Withering" a Microfiction

Beauty and charm can be asfixiating, and you can love something that it's dying or killing you.

Something like that happened with my hometown, small and isolated in the middle of the mountains, when a new promise made us think that our home would not die out. A train station and some railroads would make us more accesible, would bring some new people to live here.

The town waited while the workers gave it their all, blood and sweat alike, while the council discussed many possibilities, while the town endured many of the very few young ones going away. Because the years passed and they wanted to be someone else, to do something else.

Hope was a waning candle, but it was still there up until the very end. Through shadows and doubt, the train station and the railroads were finished, but seemingly too late: delays made people desperate, and the higher-ups rethought their plans, our town now a barely visited place.

This I was told by my grandmother, one of the many senior citizens who had to stay, weighted and anchored down by memories and sickness. Back then I was a child, alone with her in an incresingly silent place, my parents had gone away looking for a better life, they left me behind. A tomb is all that place has become, only ocasionally disturbed by the creeching of an old train that soon will also be dead and forgotten.