Sometimes a landscape remembers even when the humans building overtop have forgotten.
Originally published in Colp: Underground, in May 2021. Fantasy, 870 words.
Your condo sits inside a bright rock-candy spire. Fresh carpet in tasteful beige lines the hallway, and yet while you wait for your early-morning elevator among the other young, affluent workers comes the shush-shush of elderly velcro shoes, afraid of slipping on polished tile.
The lobby with its marble-esque panelling is always empty, except for deliveries and on Friday nights. One time you turned a corner to face a bank of payphones, as ancient as calling cards and the crumbling brick they guard, gritty and layered with time. You look up from your screen, but the phones are gone.
No one cooks much on your floor; the only smells drifting into the corridor are Windex and a faint whiff of take-out. But at night, the odour of old grease curls around the edges of your door, old, yes, industrial and reused. You think you hear someone throwing a bag into a dumpster with a rattle and smash of glass.
You are on the 34th floor.
*
Work never changes. The commute never changes. Until one day, the commute is nothing at all. Your world narrows to four glassy walls and an “order now” button. You did not know your neighbours before, and now you don’t care to.
You mosey to the elevator, hoping for mail. It is your only walk of the day.
Among the shining buttons is P5.
There was no P5 before. There was no P4. There are no number fours in your building. No 13. You never noticed before.
You hesitate, but you have no commute to miss.
So much escapes notice these days.
*
The elevator lurches.
Down. Tinkling music fills the space. A gap like a sigh and a shudder, and then the doors open. A site thought forgotten by developers, but something still remembers. Brown bricks arranged in light-dark diamonds. Stripes of panelling, oranges in diagonals. Flickering lights fluoresce; sunlight filters through the atrium, and yet you know you are underground.
Kiosks of trinket jewellery. Loitering teenagers around a bank of payphones. One pulls transparent bubble gum from her mouth and sticks it to the crumbly brick.
this was mine; i was here.
You turn the corner.
The food court is resplendently decrepit. Bought-out franchises declare their independence with mottled but proud repainted signage: Coffee Lime. Tom Norton’s Doughnuts and Ice Cream.
Another sign, even older, proclaims the Best Charbroiled Hamburgers and you know by the nostalgic smell they are the biggest and the best; the pickles and lettuce the crispest; the ketchup the sweetest. For a moment, you hesitate. But you shouldn’t.
You have things waiting for you upstairs. Meetings to watch and listen to, timesheets to account for. Motions to go through.
Gathered on fixed-seat stools are the old fellows, nursing dollar coffees and old wounds, sharing good-natured grievances as if a box of pastries.
One spots you and nods.
He gestures to the empty seat.
You smile wanly.
He hears your thoughts and laughs: you think you have no time for this. We were like you; you will be like us.
You back away, but the voice continues: all you have is time.
The escalators are broken, save one. You take it up to the mezzanine. There is nothing there, just old tile scuffed from a generation of sneaker soles. There is no condo above you, merely angled roof studded with skylights. A lone roosting pigeon in among the struts coos at your intrusion. It too hears your thoughts: it too wandered in and cannot find its way out of the past.
Over the wooden railing you see the microcosm below you, how all the people come and go, mere memories told in old fashions and bags of groceries.
this was ours; we were here.
Back down the creaking broken escalator, the steps bending under your tentative weight. Below you, the two coin rides—horse and rocket ship—sit rusted and still, admired by generations of tiny longings, hands pulling on ghostly clothes and pointing.
Beyond the food court, the Zellers is shuttered, metal gates meeting with a hand-lettered sign: “Sorry we missed you!”. You missed them too. Scents of lemon cleaner, hot sandwiches, cigarettes and polyester leave like employees, drifting by you, waving, calling you ‘hon’. A head dip and a smile: they remember you, even if you don’t recall them.
You cannot find the elevators.
A slow, staring pace, as though you cannot believe how small this world was. Store after store is closed, mannequins watching you with tilted expressions. Your journey is a closed circle. You arrive back at the Food Court. You try again, counter-clockwise, at a more frantic jog.
There are no elevators.
Perhaps there never were.
There is no sign of your former pinnacles, piercing the sky with their angled reflections. All that you had laid within them, connected by light and vibrations to everyone you ever knew.
But now everyone you ever knew is gone.
But now everyone you ever knew is here.
There is a seat for you, a cup of steaming coffee, a cruller. The metal tabletop is covered in crumbs.
Crumbs
of
stories.
of things moved past and unmoveable.
You take your seat. For now
all you have is time.
END
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