Hands jammed in my pockets as I walked along the downtown square, my fingers moved stiffly, numb from the wind. Shop windows stood empty, if not broken and trashed. Paper and styrofoam cups spun in miniature tornados in the street. By habit alone I checked both ways before crossing the street. The fountain in the center was silent, muddy puddles rippling within its confines a poor memory of the water that used to flow here.
One figure sat alone on a bench, casting bread crusts to nonexistent birds, though I thought I might have seen a rat or two peeking from the overgrown bushes.
“Didn’t know if you would be here,” I said, sitting on a neighboring bench.
“Nowhere else to go,” she remarked.
Over the tops of the buildings loomed a wasteland, growing darker and darker by the
moment.
“You wanted to see it?” I asked.
“Not really,” she sighed, looking up for the first time, not overjoyed at what she saw in me. “Do you ever start going somewhere and don’t realize where it was until you get there?”
“Used to.”
“This is where it all started. Poetic this is the last place left. Why are you here?”
I paused. “To ask the universe for forgiveness, maybe.”
She nodded to the rolling black cloud encroaching. “I have a name, you know.”
“You never told it to me.”
“I had more important things. Is this what you wanted?”
“No.” My voice was almost inaudible, but she heard me anyway. “Never.”
“It rarely is.” She looked over at me. “It won’t be, anymore.”
My heart raced, but there was nowhere else to run. Wringing my hands would be a waste of energy. Regardless, I felt the first hot stream of tears escape the corner of my eye.
“You promise?”
The corner of her mouth quirked up in something like sympathy. “I promise.”