I woke up to this piece of art from  arterian21 and, well, it really floored me.

I tend to assume that funerals and cemeteries aren't the ornate affairs we're accustomed to, and that it's possible that not everyone even gets a tombstone. Perhaps there's one off to the side of the Alley, where families who could afford a proper burial are allowed to lay their dead. Perhaps it was initially more respectable and proper, but once the Alley began to collapse the graveyard couldn't really expand. I've read stories of cemeteries in poor regions where the recent dead are simply buried above the old and a fresh tombstone is put down. So here we have the St. Michael's Cemetery.

There are a handful of visible epitaphs, each telling its own story. You can see Nick and Alphonse III, but also an infant, a woman who made to old age before the Alley's fall really happened, and a poor boy whose tombstone was desecrated. I looked at all of them for a little while, like I have when walking through a real graveyard, calculating ages and just imagining what stories they could tell.

Some time ago I saw a documentary on the violence in Chicago, and one of the residents, speaking on the youth violence, said something that resonated deep for me. He said (and I'm paraphrasing a bit), "I'm 26, and that's old here. The caskets is just gettin' shorter and shorter". As violence settles in more and more in the Alley, I can only imagine that the life expectancy drops dramatically. There are older residents, but unless some changes are made, how many grey whiskers would we see in twenty, thirty years' time?

More than anything else, the trash on the ground speaks volumes, laid alongside small flowers and other offerings. For every memorial a rat wants to give their mother or son, another wants to toss beer bottles over the fence or spray paint the RR emblem on the stone. Hey, it ain't like the dead bastard's gonna climb up an' stop me, eh?

Again, all this done by  arterian21