I lived on the corner of Sunset Court and Fall Place. A fallen neighborhood. Three clovered cul-de-sacs on the older, inner side of the parkway, wilting in the shadows of starter castles propagating to the west. Front yards unfenced. It was a tree that marked a boundary. A forsythia. But for kids every yard was your yard, even past dark. Hiding in boxwood from flashlights, you could listen along to whatever primetime that house had programmed for itself.
1235 Sunset sat across from a sewer. It caught its share of toys, frisbees. A child's arm can reach so little, so some father's crowbar could become a kind of key. Through a manhole the light of the world reversed itself. The sub-terrain was cool and wet, an open strip like a skylight through which found items got passed. A kid could stay for hours down there. No one dared enter the tunnel, where the day just vanished.
One summer, proud chuffing collossi came in and painted the streets over with new tar, crushed stones. Spare cars were ushered away from the curbs in advance. Kids kickballed elsewhere for four days. Kids cluttered the sidewalks to watch the purply sludge steam in the morning sunlight, strange men trowel it smooth with brooms, and the steamroller come crushing. It was blocked, staged, as in theatre.
No one ever died, or got poisoned. Once, someone's grandfather ripped half his finger off on a bandsaw, but then he got it sewn back together. Once, a cat went missing. Once, a hen, fat as a pumpkin, appeared clucking in a paper bag set out with someone's garbage.
It's like: no one was even divorced. Everything had a kind of whitewashed feel, back then in that place. Destruction had to be sought out and rendered. It couldn't ever just come knocking. The new tarmac lay baking for months before Bryan, sitting in a gutter, his heels pressed to the curb, picked enough of the pavement's rubble up that it came off not as a pill but a sheet. A stratum he then held in his palm. It wasn't the whole street. The old street, now exposed, asserted itself. The color everyone used to see as background. It was softer on the eye. A day less stormy.
Everyone shifted off the curb, lined up hip to hip, gripped tiny pincers where streetmeat met the concrete gutter, and ripped.
No one ever bled. It came off too easily.
The Eighties died decades ago. Now, different people live there and speak a different language. Everyone's been forgotten. It's not a crime. It's wrong to say a way of life has been lost, or that anything has, really. The telling of stories keeps lost business found.
Here's a story: Joann's father rented softcore from the Erol's every other month or so. Her mother was a witch, so went the rumor. They moved in in 1987 and within ten years her witch mother would succumb to Alzheimer's. In the evenings, she would lie vacant-eyed with her husband in front of the television. Her husband would smooth her hair, softly, slowly, until it was time to go to sleep.
Outside the kids of the neighborhood knew too little of this, had begun running around in cars, sleeping through whole mornings. There were jobs to run off to. After-school activities, cars skittering recklessly out of those scab-rimmed cul-de-sacs, tires burning on all that ruined pavement.
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