Lonely City

This story is another writing post, this piece is the first draft of Lonely City from my minute fiction class I hope you enjoy it 

In the city of  Solus, you can enter and exit without even knowing it. There is not a stop light, or even a stop sign, there is just a street. One lonely resilient street.  There are not signs leading up to it, nor is it marked on a map. In fact it just blends in with the urban landscaping around it. 

On this street there are five buildings, and they are all abandoned. Two are brick, and the brick is crumbling, you can swipe your finger over it and a film and cloud of terra-cotta clay dust comes with you.   You can tell where the five and dime store was, the movie theatre, soda shop, and the department store, but what you can’t tell is where the people went or what happened to the city. 

Standing in the street  you get an eerie sense that you are not alone, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and you shiver as you gaze in to the glass of the five and dime store. One of the panes broken but seemingly enough, nothing has been disturbed inside the store. And the store remains, contents intact, how it was when it was in use. Bags are still in their carousels, toys are still on shelves, tacky velvet paintings are still hung on the cork-board walls, and make-up is still in the glass cabinets. It is as if when looking at the five and dime store that the people just left, not even bothering to clear out. 

The rest of the city is a mirror image of the five and dime. The movie theatre is missing its grand marque, but the plastic letters of the last show played litter the broken sidewalk in pieces, and the neon lights, advertising future films, blink rapidly like they are trying to stay alive in their dilapidated home. The street has pot holes, and cracks that weeds now grow between. The street that leads up to Solus however is maintained and the road that follows Solus is pristine, as if the inhabitants of the other cities just paved up to where their road ends or begins and went no further, leaving Solus a relic of the past, an archaeological dig for the future.

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