RAG AND BONE

All had abandoned the street in the late twilight. Even the sun scurried away in the weaning hours, hiding just behind a horizon of fences, composed of irregular boards like a rag-tag army of infantrymen, who, try as they might, could not stand straight up and down, but listed into one another. Nature had worn down their tough exteriors, thinned their own varnished surface to a grizzly veneer of thorns and knots and oddly-shaped holes, perfect to peek through to see the other side.

Here, two aspects of the city met.

On one side of the dividing line stood two-storied buildings, square red-brick buildings with dirty windows kept behind a rusted iron bars and upon which gold and black paint identified the owner of the business, with bland, nondescript walls, save for the brightly colored spray paint applied to their most obvious side.

The tags identified local hoodlums in singular nicknames, Rage, Mack, Fever, applied in large bubbled letters, two-toned, rounded, glistening, sparkling. These singular nomatives imbued with emotional pitch, radiating a type of magical, harkened back to the historical warriors of old, whose histories remained undiscovered in the tomes the hoodlums desecrated while passing time in the temporary depositories known as schools. These were the true owners of the ground upon which the brick buildings stood.

Youth had overtaken the ancient. What could these brick buildings, old men, hunched over the sidewalks that ran underneath their front doors, and even over the crumbling road filled with potholes and bits of trash, what could these crumbling structures do against the impulsiveness, the fearlessness, the vanity of youth, who would one day age and become similarly decrepit. But not today.

And then, on the other side of the division, a series of white wooden houses, ringed in steel-linked fences, trimmed with the red-brown rust that comes with age and time. The houses all seemed to droop about themselves, as if a sadness had sat down upon the area, weighing down the roofs and walls of the homes. In the front yards of a few, some fierce dogs paced endlessly back and forth, making a dusty path, kicking up clouds of dirt into the searing oppressiveness. These ugly mongrels wore snarling masks which showed hints of jagged yellowed teeth glistening with saliva, as if they were readying themselves when they would eventually be released, set loose upon the public, mogul hoards ready to conquer neighboring lands.

If the American dream lifted…