On the corner of Heather and Larkspur Ave

I twisted my head upward, looking at the stars stuck in the sky. It was an eerie evening, one you could picture being in some horror movie with screaming and chainsaws and shit. Only a few street lamps were lit, and everyone I knew was either blacked out in their beds, or the same in someone else’s. Not worrying about nothing, well, nothing other than the job they all forget they had. Most people, don’t typically like the night. As a group, people have always skipped right over it, like a rock over a pond. I’ve wondered why for so long. But the only sorta explanation I could give was that all people stay away from it, not just some, but Everyone. No one goes out at night, you don’t, not ever anymore around here. Not ever since we did away with laws. And cause of it, now, we’re scared of the dark, like we're all kids again. It makes us feel vulnerable. Heck, I hate the night, yet here I am, somehow sucked into it.

The nightly mover made his way, block after block, street after street, passing through the residential district of town, and now traveling deeper into the stomach of the beast. His footsteps continued their consistent patter throughout the speechless city, reverberating off its intrigued walls. It was about three now.

…

You know, it’s depressing… to look back on the past, knowing it was better than where you are now. Knowing that through all of the humanities’ efforts to create a more equal and open world, here we are, beaten and at the brink of savagery. Were we really ever trying to better it, it’s almost impossible to tell now. After living this long in despair it sure as hell doesn’t seem like anyone actually tried. The homeless, now more than ever, pace the streets, lacking a living room or an entrance hall, I guess, to do it in. They just walk and mumble in the daytime as far as I or anyone else can see, perhaps for attention. But what do they do now? Do they sleep too? And if so, why do I fear being alone out here? Who is after me if everyone else is asleep? Where do the invisible eyes I feel go? Not here, or behind the fold-out chair over there, but where? I can still feel them, pressing like weights on the back of my head and neck. The same ones that disappear when I swing myself around. The same exact ones that make me even more afraid when I can’t find them. There should be eyes, I should see them. The fact that I haven’t only affirms their secrecy. And it only freaks me out the more.

The man slowed his pace for a moment to peer down a long, vacant alleyway. Or so it was thought to be. There was life, one life, a distance within. It saw the man in his own twisted posture. And it saw the man in his overcoat and, in return, became scared itself. But it was just a cat looking up from its scraps, already cleaned from a can. It wasn’t a suspicious being, mulling over the man’s life. It wasn’t, But the man still stood frozen, glued to the sight of something uncertain somewhere far down in the depths of the alley, past the cat, and into the void of the unknown. And it was after a stubborn and useless effort that the man was finally able to move away from whatever it was that caught his eye. He then carried on down the darkening street, ceding himself to his thoughts once again.

“Beyond a street in your life waits hope, stuck in an intersection, muddled together with the chaos of both traffic and life,” (spoke a plastic bag forever forgotten)

“Half-past one,” the man said to himself as rested his jittery body on a cold, steel bench at the corner of Heather and Larkspur Ave. He watched the yellow flame, between the two streets, awkwardly springing into color, then out of it again. It pounded and pulsed in the shadow’s head, like a firefly shaped into perfection by man, consistently blinking yellow without mistake, or hesitance, or doubt. It was perfect, in the sight of the imperfect humans, because it didn’t resemble us. It didn’t hesitate, it didn’t stop, it didn’t for a second think that what it was doing could in any way possibly ever be wrong. It didn’t do one of those things because we made it that way; unable to resist, regardless of the task, performing in perfection. 

This little, yellow, blinking light scared the man more than anything else that he had felt up until now. And he began to wonder why. But thankfully for the man, the explanation he sought wasn’t far off. It was above him, up in the blinking stoplight that he was now trying to decipher. 

“We’re imitators,” he said to himself, “magicians with tricks, with birds up our sleeves. Imitating something we can’t know.”

The man sat back now, finally relaxing himself upon the warm steel bench. He closed his eyes and fell asleep, satisfied.

To the man, That was all that life had progressed to be: a “producer” of perfection in a state of imperfection. A fake, a facade, looking vainly upon everything for one’s own gain. But besides the present, and sure to be distorted future, there were earlier times, times for people like these to look back upon, when the world wasn’t so bleak and painful. In actuality though, the hopeful past was still riddled with pain, just less of it, making it better. It was a time when people could still care for others without being stabbed in the back. But now, you don’t care. You can’t. We all pass the extinguished on the other side. Turning inward and looking down is all we do. Living life in a world of death… Even now, a foreign figure twisted himself into the yellow pulsing light on the corner of Heather and Larkspur Ave. The figure must’ve sensed something unsuited for night. It looked down at his clothes and at his shoes and socks, avoiding the sleeping face turned to the side. Then coming to a conclusion, with his knife he stabbed with dreams of wealth. It was there, everything the figure needed, all for the price of a life. Which, to him, in that moment, meant nothing. He saw blood before he saw the face, that is only if he ever looked.