Writer's Block: The Voiding

 

The Voiding

Behold! Here we have a neighborhood just like any other in future America. Look at this house, with its peeling skin of flesh-colored siding revealing the rotten frame beneath. The truck in front is a rusted hunk of metal leaking black crude slowly onto the pavement to congeal in the storm drain like drying blood. The wind blows and rustles the garbage on the sidewalk, giving flight to plastic bags and paper wrappers. If you stand and watch the windows, you see nothing but darkness, no matter how long you linger. In the back yard, playground equipment sags askew, the tangled chains of a swing moving slightly in the breeze. You think of the little people who should be out there, swinging in the sunlight, giving voice to their merriment, but there is no sign that they exist anymore.

Across the street lies a school, its teal windows shut and locked. A robot kicks on suddenly, a small disk-shaped thing that resembles a pill bug, and it begins its systematic routine, cutting grass almost silently like the ghostly spirit of past janitors long ago replaced. A raccoon rummages in a trashcan only to emerge empty-handed; it considers the robot for a few moments before scurrying down the street, brazen in its lack of fear. You observe the pill bug—maybe it will finally die after all of these years—but it keeps on going somehow, a vestige of a more living past.

What is the past you think as your boots tread the split sidewalk. It is your memory—it lives in your imagination, in the pictures and emotions you carry inside your mind. It is the state of death, of things lost and consumed, and it is supposed to be dead but you see it as you walk through the neighborhood, witnessing the signs. Suddenly in the window of a derelict house you see light flickering on, so you stop and peer through the dusty panes of glass. From what you can see, the carpet is the color of mold, mossy with decay, the recliner with its back you similarly discolored and diseased. A flat panel mounted onto the wall has turned on, triggered, perhaps, by your passing. A human face moves on the screen—oh my god, she looks so young you think—her ruby lips parting to mouth words you cannot hear or understand. You stand transfixed by this golden-hair siren. She has an object in her hands, a little piece of plastic, and she keeps gesticulating toward it as though touting its obvious benefits. What can she be attempting to convey to you? You don’t understand. Around you is the dead dream of a million minds and this is the specter they send? You can’t accept that it is meaningless, that everything around you moves only to decay. You pounds on the glass and shout. What is that voice? Why does it cause the hairs to stand up on your neck? Have you awoken the dead? Will they come seeking vengeance?

As fast as you can you flee, the echo of your own steps in pursuit.