The Pecking Order

Recipe for an unusual story:
1. Take a forlorn little city with nothing left but the memory of a glorious past.
2. Add a monumental bureaucratic blunder that brings the promise of a miraculous restoration if everyone in town will cooperate.
3. Stir in the bizarre requirement that all of the citizens must align themselves at the same hour on the same day along the city's streets in exact order of their importance.
4. Mix with natural human responses of pride, greed, selfishness, envy, devotion to duty and kindness.
5. Decorate with festoons of lunacy, ignorance and irony.
Presto! You have The Pecking Order!