Fiction: Sidewalk Stories

Sidewalk Stories

The Bus Stop

Twenty minutes passed since Emily first arrived at the bus stop.  The rain, merely a drizzle upon her arrival, now came down in a steady stream and beat on the clear, plastic roof.  She shivered, sniffed, and stared down the road in the hopes of mentally willing the bus to appear.  Across the street, the bus for the opposite route stopped, and Emily glared.

“That’s the second time,” she muttered.  “Come on, bus.  I’m freezing here.”

She was going to be sick tomorrow; she just knew it.  This was an awful day.  She woke up with plenty of time to get to the interview, left home when she needed to, and all it took was getting on the wrong bus to end up in an entirely different town and two hours behind schedule.  After a few transfers she finally found her way to the agency, but the sidewalks she had to take from the bus stop weren’t made for walking. Overgrown with weeds, sprouted right up in the middle of the sidewalk, and not even whole in parts, Emily bypassed the sidewalk entirely and made do by walking the bike lane on the street.  Paired with the rain, Emily resigned herself to remain unemployed for the time being; compared to all the other applicants who arrived clean, dry, and composed in their cars, Emily’s dripping clothes and squishing shoes weren’t likely to impress anyone.  Then there was the excessive lateness of her arrival, which she was sure, did little to compensate for her appearance.

Still, she’d gone through with the interview.  She accomplished what she set out to do that day, come hell or complicated bus routes, and that was what mattered.  Now all she wanted to do was go home.

If only that damn bus would just come already…!

Despite the rain and the distance, Emily would have just started walking by now if this area were conducive to it.  She lived right in the city’s center and was accustomed to walking everywhere (which was why she didn’t have a car in the first place), and so walking in the direction of home until the bus caught up with her would have suited Emily just fine, but this was in the outer boundaries of the city—the parts where all the big-name companies set up shop with their giant parking lots and sidewalks so narrow Emily doubted two people could walk side by side comfortably without rubbing elbows.

Emily shivered again, curled her fingers into her palm, and pulled her fists inside the cuff on her sleeves.  She chided herself for not dressing warmer, and then immediately argued that she would have had she known that she’d be in this situation.  Another counterargument sprung up in her mind, that she knew there was a possibility of rain and therefore should have prepared for the worst possible situation.  She realized she was pacing inside the bus stop structure and talking to herself when a young man, likely in his early twenties, hurried underneath the roof and took down his hood.

“You and me both, lady,” he said with a laugh.

Emily offered him a weak smile and nodded.  She wished she knew what she had just been mumbling.  The man stood on the far side of the building and Emily slunk to the other side, straightened, and brought her hands to her mouth.  She rubbed them together and breathed on them.

“Some weather we’re having,” the young man said.

“Sure is,” Emily replied.

It was another seven minutes, passed in silence, until the bus arrived.  She boarded the bus for home.

The Park

 All the kids at Morgan H. Straker Elementary knew to avoid Valmont Park after school, but knowing wasn’t enough; for some people, Valmont couldn’t be avoided no matter the precautions taken.  While most of his classmates didn’t have to give Valmont a passing thought, Elliot lived two blocks away from the park, and Valmont loomed between school and home like an impenetrable force of doom.  It was a playground, sure, but no kids went there—at least no kids Elliot’s age who knew what was good for them.  More than once Elliot had taken different paths home to avoid encounters by Valmont, but these methods inevitably made him later getting home, or forced him into more dangerous, unfamiliar territory.  The Gang Kids (at least that’s what Elliot thought they were) in Valmont were at least his bullies, unlike the ones in other neighborhoods where Elliot’s face was unknown.

After the final tone sounded for the school day, Elliot lagged behind his classmates in leaving the classroom.  He dragged his feet along the pavement on the way home to the two bedroom apartment he shared with his mother, maternal grandmother, and uncle, who moved in when Dad went back to jail last November.  Mom was sick a lot and didn’t work so she was likely to be asleep at this time of day, but Uncle Terrence would box him in the ears if he arrived back too late.  Twenty minutes was all anyone needed to get from the school to the apartment building, and there were chores waiting.  Elliot reached into the front pocket on his uniform trousers and clasped the loose change in his pocket.  His heart thumped against his ribcage.

Elliot took a breath.  The solid, concrete wall that stretched down part of the park’s perimeter up to the chain-link fence loomed before him.   Graffiti assaulted his eyes; it imposed upon Elliot like a million screams and promises of what was unseen behind the wall.  The concrete enclosure kept Elliot out of their view as much as they were kept from his, but they were waiting—he knew they were waiting.  And this wall was nothing more than a joke, a tease, a false sense of security because unless he was planning on turning around and taking a different path, Elliot had to reveal himself.  He had to step away from the temporary shelter and expose himself.  His stomach flopped over.  The rank odor of garbage and cigarette smoke permeated through the air; his eyes stung.  The part of the chain-link fence where one of the teenagers had busted the fence off the frame was still broken and calling to Elliot like a mirage or a premonition of his future.

He stepped between the barrier where safety and exposure met.  The heckles began.  All five guys—tall, imposing, and one carrying a metal baseball bat—swaggered over to the open gate and onto the sidewalk.

They spoke—Elliot knew they spoke.  He heard what they said, processed it, understood, but it was like as soon as the sentence was finished, Elliot had already forgotten what was said to him.  He went through the motions.  His muscles trembled.  He turned out his pockets—one of the guys plucked the change from his sweaty palm as Elliot trembled.  His stomach clenched—the cigarette smoke was so strong.  His back hit the fence; Elliot’s head thwacked against the metal.  He was on his feet and they pounded against the pavement on their own accord.

In the emergency stairwell of his apartment building, Elliot collapsed against the stairs and allowed a breath to enter his lungs.  He had to pull himself together before Uncle Terrence saw him.  He had to do it for Mama’s sake.

The Family Store

Something died that last Saturday night at Garlow’s Corner Store.  Nostalgia, maybe.  Sentimentality?  Maybe even Jake’s own childhood.  Whatever it was, it had been irreparably severed from him leaving Jake with such a sense of loss, such a lack of direction, he couldn’t articulate this feeling if he’d tried.

Somehow he thought it’d be more dramatic.  Like a customer might rush to the store just at closing time—dramatically bang on the locked door, desperate to get inside or something.  Make a scene; prove that someone still cared.  Jake didn’t know who he was kidding.  The regulars had long deserted the Garlows’ store for the lower prices and convenience of supermarkets and superstores in areas of the city only accessible by cars.  That’s really all the city had become these days, anyway, except for the nucleus where some family businesses still held the prayer of a fighting chance.  In the border neighborhoods, however—like the one where Garlow’s had stood for the last forty-six years—small businesses were obsolete.  Neighborhoods segregated into commercial and residential these days.  Many of the other small business had already closed down or moved away due to zoning laws and the big corporate competition.  Neighborhoods like Jake’s were only good for people with cars; pedestrians were a thing of the past.  A trend that had gone out like acid-washed jeans and lava lamps.

Jake couldn’t stand it; the adrenaline, the rush of nerves that fired up his body and flushed his face, seemed to rip through his very soul.  He huffed, drooped, and glared at the ‘for sale’ sign posted in the display window.  His grandfather built this store with nothing but dreams, his father watched that dream fall apart, and now there was nothing left but shattered fragments—memories—to pass on.  What was that supposed to say about the state of Jake’s generation?  About the outlook for his future?

When he was a child—before his grandfather retired—Jake remembered the variety of people who stopped in the store.  Most of them were neighborhood regulars, but people passing by on the way to and from work or school or people just taking a lunch break or made up a sizable portion, too.  Jake remembered running odd errands—receiving packages, checking invoices, or checking in at one of the other family stores to ask a favor.  They all had depended on each other just as much as the customers depended on them. 

He used to play on the front stoop or in the street with the other neighborhood boys, much to the chagrin of any cars that did venture down the street.  In the late evenings during summer vacation Jake often lent an ear to patrons wandering home from the nearby bar, reeking of alcohol, and still full of stories and advice suited just for a growing boy’s ears.  To this day these were the men Jake remembered the best and the ones he missed the most.

When he was a child, Jake used to hate those ridiculous stories adults told.  Those cock and bull stories about walking to school, barefoot, uphill (both ways), in six feet of snow.  He hated that nostalgic, far off tone his father got about “the old days” and doubted they were really as great as his old man made them out to be.  He vowed that when he grew up, he would never subject anyone to such ludicrous tales.

Maybe it was a generational thing based on the subjectivity and optimism of childhood or something, but Jake was pretty damn sure he was a kid at the best time there ever was to be a kid.  Kids these days had it so easy it was sickening, but at the same time, he kind of felt sorry for them because places like this—like Garlow’s—no longer existed.  The corporations saw to that.  And with the dwindling availability of small, family-run shops, a person’s options died along with them.

Jake thought it might be the ties to his past—to the experiences that built him that died that night.  But if he looked at it on a larger scale—at the root of the demise—he thought maybe this was just another pillar to the collapse of a better time.  Better, at least, to Jake.