One Way Street by Chris Carrel

The city gets stranger the farther Randy goes and he wears a scowl to ward off potential hostilities. The mood on the street is like a spreading bruise and the faces of passing strangers bear the strains of dark struggles. He walks beneath a sullen haze that roughly complements the worn skin of the old apartment blocks. The nation’s malaise seems to have settled on everything like a fine dust.

Randy ended the fight by leaving when he should have apologized. Instead, he told Jesse he was going out for cigarettes and slammed the apartment door for emphasis. Yes, there was half a pack left in his jacket pocket but he’s no stranger to lies of convenience.

There is no other plan in his mind than to follow his feet and try to outpace the turmoil churning up his head and gut. And so he walks on, hands tucked inside the heavy, denim jacket, his long and greasy auburn hair held down by a Seahawks cap. He knows he is a museum piece, a living fossil slowly being gentrified into extinction. The largeness and wealth of the city accuse him of irrelevance. He answers with footsteps that cut the sidewalk in two, each step a flag claiming territory on the map of existence.

Once the initial heat of conflict settles in him, Randy stops to smoke a cigarette beneath the awning of an apartment doorway. He wrestles with and rejects the urge to score. No matter where he is, or how many sober years are behind him, he is never far from falling back down that well. Not today, though, he tells himself.

The city continues to move past his doorway, unspooling a parade of time-harried office workers, midday traffic and his fellow ne’er-do-wells. There is something odd, though, in what he sees. Even the parts that should be stationary – the corners of buildings, the sidewalk edges – bear an aspect of motion, a cryptic and desperate vibration that he can’t quite parse. Five years sober and he still occasionally sees the hallucinogenic and inexplicable.

Extinguishing the smoldering butt with his shoe, Randy resumes walking, heading toward the city’s old industrial zone where he once worked as a union welder. His body feels as heavy as the units he used to repair. As he nears the district, the air thickens with the collision of old and new, and the predatory desires of money. This once beating heart of the city is slowly being encroached and swallowed by tech towers, startups and luxury condos.

The one-way street comes as a surprise to him. A mirage, Randy thinks. He knows this city. A one-way street shouldn’t be there, but the rectangular white sign with black lettering insists that it is. He re-reads it to be sure and looks ahead to confirm that the two-lanes of worn, gray asphalt are arranged for one-way traffic pointed toward him.

There is no movement on the street, at all. Its sidewalks are devoid of people. Even the ubiquitous presence of pigeons on the mooch has become an absence. The few cars parked on the street appear abandoned. An ancient gray relic from the 90s rests driverless in the middle of the two lane road, its driver and passenger doors hanging open. The front driver side tire is sunk into a pothole as wide as a manhole cover.

Stepping onward, Randy’s eyes cast anxious darts, looking around for an explanation that won’t be found. The shops and businesses have been abandoned for years and appear to have endured several rounds of looting. Doors to buildings are broken and lay open toward the street. Most of the ground floor windows are smashed. A callous breeze kicks up at his back, urging him forward and the air tastes of decay and dead history.

The farther Randy walks, the deeper the ruination goes. Sidewalk cracks grow into fissures, he passes piles of broken furniture tossed from nearby buildings and left broken to rot in the street. The haunting sound of torn awnings rippling in the cold wind adds to his growing unease.

There is no sign of reason on the desolate avenue. The decay offers no confession and its broken windows pose only questions. Looking into one of the few intact panes he finds a distorted version of his own face wracked in anguish and he ends up staring into the abyss of himself.

The wrecked and ruined street is a warning that bleeds through the cracks like drops of red working their way through microscopic tears in a vein. He sees an image of his own blood spilling backward through the needle and billowing into the syringe like a crimson cloud. Caught in the liquid flow of time, it is impossible to know whether this has already happened or is happening at this very moment. His hands begin to shake and his brow grows cool and clammy.

With oblivion staring him down, his thoughts alight on Jesse’s face and he remembers the way she nursed him through the worst days, through the blood and the vomit and the foul words he spat up. She ignored his curses and kept him alive until he could stand under his own weight again.

The wind changes direction and deepens to a violent howl, a deafening roar from the gods of entropy. He cannot go back the way he came, despite the strong desire to turn and flee. That way lies anger, cowardice, and the tip of a loaded needle. Jesse lies ahead of him.

Randy draws a deep breath into his lungs and steels himself against the unknown. Setting off again, he strides down the middle of the road, leaning defiantly into the gusts, determined to outlast the glorious fury of the one-way street.

Chris Carrel

Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay – One way Street Sign White arrow with black block writing and a plain wall with one window in the background.