In the beginning there was nothing. Then man came and built The Town. Houses appeared, streets, squares, shops, schools, factories, public gardens. At first the roads were paved, then tarmacked, with decorated white borders for the public holidays. People appeared on the streets and on the benches, began sneezing at the floating white seeds from the poplar trees; selling sunflower seeds at the factory gates; falling in love. People were born, and they died.

And a Cemetery appeared on the edge of The Town. And people brought their dead there and placed them in holes and sprinkled earth into the holes. They went there on memorial days and for anniversaries and left biscuits and sweets with white fillings. They weeded out the grass with their hands and replaced it with pansies. And the Cemetey began to grow...

But people didn't just die. They were born too and so the Town grew as well.

And then at some point the Town and the Cemetery met. People built a five-storey block right next to the Cemetery and began to live in it. To begin with everyone found it horrible, they were afraid to look out of the window. But then they got used to it. They even built metal garages along the Cemetery fence and kept their cars in them and motorbikes and old bits and pieces. They even thought up a name for their block, an amusing one. They called it 'Dead and Alive'. And that's what it's called even now.

And they buried the new dead in a different place.

And it almost seemed as if they'd forgotten about the old dead. They stopped putting out biscuits and sweets with white fillings. They stopped planting pansies. There was nothing there. It became overgrown with grass, extraordinarily long and rampant grass. And the Cemetery was buried in this grass. It disappeared. It ceased to exist. It died. And together with the Cemetery, all of the dead died. For a second time. This time for good...

prologue of Ladybird by Sigarev