October 1, 2025 — On September 22, 2025, a crisp sunny day, a one-woman march began on Progress Boulevard, organized by a woman who lost her entire family on the Day of Flesh. Over the next few days, others would stream in alongside her, swelling the ranks and, within a week, forming a street-wide procession of solemn remembrance.

The parade consisted of high schoolers mourning lost friends, sad abuelitas and grieving grandpas escorted by their angry children and confused grandchildren, concerned veterans and outspoken (but now silently reverent) activists, with the hooded Lowly Nobody leading this unregimented contingent of memorializers, all of them in their blackest of black clothing, all while spiritiual elders shared pamphlets, community leaders walked arm-in-arm with homebound introverts, the parade extending, at one point, the length of 12 city blocks, and which was given solmen approval by all the red-eyed neighbors, broken-hearted residents, and tear-streaked people who came out to pay their funereal respects, despite local loyalties.

In addition to everyone gathering each morning to pay their respects, another phenomenon occurred each morning right before the funeral march began. People hung flags or banners from their windows, each neighborhood or block sporting logos or slogans supporting one of the factions they backed: OFLEC, SMAW, the Orforcorporatists, The Service, GAFFE, The Slop Bucket Brigade, the Fanboys, the glassfolk, the workinfolk, or a specific subwoko, among others. The big colorful cloth flags and banners all signified pride and purpose, but also implicitly warned of reprisal and revenge. 

Somewhere along the timeline, an unspoken civic agreement emerged with the paraders, and the "Entry of the Gladiators" became the official marching song. They looped the military march-turned-clown theme over and over during their daily procession. The car horns blaring and blasting from the stopped traffic only enhanced the impact of this funereal dirge for a merciless circus.

Looking Forward to Forgetting This Peculiar Situation

After local medical professionals triaged the living injured, it took them nearly a month to sift through the maggoted piles of limbs and skulls, the shattered glass corpses, and the mass graves before they could begin calculating the casualties. As of publication, the parking lot remains a smouldering crater of busted and charred rubbish.

Mayor Maplemay was a conspicuously absent figure throughout the entirety of the day’s events and for nearly a week afterward, with sources suggesting that he departed late on Aug. 31 to attend a spiritual and hunting retreat in South America. The Mayor did not make his first public appearance or give his first public statement on the matter until Sept. 7. In part, the statement read, “This peculiar situation must remain in our rearview mirrors and left to the dustbin of history. We should all come together to look forward to forgetting this peculiar situation. This moment reminds me of a famous quote: ‘We must excuse the people's fury moved by a laudable zeal which is difficult to restrain once it has been stirred up.’ It’s time for us all to come together, clean up, and look ahead.”

Once a beacon for jobs, innovation, and achieving the Orange Forest Goal, the City had become terra non grata, a dumpland haunted by the daily parade of the Ghosts of a Recent Memory Most Foul, the Ghosts of a Present No One Enjoys, and the Ghosts of a Future Already Gone Awry.

No one involved in the parade would provide a comment on or off the record.

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