The sky is dark. Hazy. Dark. A crack of thunder interrupts the sound of rain penetrating a collection of lonely pines near the edge of a cemetery. It guides an unescapable moment of numinous silence. For one single instant the sky ignites. Hot, bright, white. Just beyond the long shadows cast upon gloomy trees along Locust street a figure comes into full view. Mary dances capriciously upon the grave of her unrivalled faith.
For them, it was a happy day. A ****** trip upstate for an ivy league education. A proper baptism for their eldest granddaughter among waterfalls channeling the firm redemptive grasp of the finger lakes. Before these days of welding fumes and urban decay.
She hid among the books. Projecting her unstable mind upon rows of cast iron shelves to watch them fall three floors below. Her safe existence dissolved slowly while the pages called forward the thrill of pure undefiled truth. And while her peers were busy building an empty cardboard box container faith she slipped from her own eschatological resting place.
She vanished desperately into an ethereal fog that night. A divine curtain culminating her ignorant adolescence and prophesying dangerously about the upcoming winding Pennsylvania interstate.
She wiped her face and pushed through the dark with nothing in her grandparent’s 4-Runner but a hastily gathered selection of clothing stuffed into a black garbage bag. She spent months watching her fragile soul become slowly crushed by the weight of an immovable system, fraudulent and morbidly obese. She had often contemplated an effective means to quicken her own spiritual suicide but as long as this 4-Runner was moving she would press on.
The state forrest mocked her as she drove. It called her a fool as she began to second guess the decisions she made which led her deeper into this self imposed exile. As her mind began to wander from a state of useful diagnosis into the depths of self deception a white tail flashed quickly across the front of her windshield. That was all it took to bring her face to face with the gravity of her situation. Life and death intersected ten miles beyond the intersection of Windy City Rd.
Mary pulled glass and blood from her hair and struggled desperately to turn the key as if she were running. Not running away from but toward something. Running headlong into a redefinition of life as she believed it to be.
She ran headlong into the temporal seduction of looming blast furnaces beside the rivers of steel. They would drag her search for authenticity through an unholy descent into the lasting clutches of addiction.
Now through abandoned lots Mary walks. Every morning. Every evening. Up steep forgotten streets. Crumbling asphalt, red brick and stone layered inappropriately upon each other. The decay revealing a necessary and unmistakable ode to generations of forbidden deconstruction. At Electric Avenue she would often rush to cast her sins upon the curb of the Hollywood Show Bar.
Day after day this perpetual state of filth quickly stained her hands black. Tar black like the God ****** wasteland she suffered for every day. Maybe a heaven doesn’t exist? Is this is all there is?
She turns the key. Guiding an unwelcome wave of optimism toward the rusted grey Toyota 4-Runner parked in an empty lot beyond the edge of the cemetery.
Through another strange land of death could this rusted out faith still carry her away?
The starter clicks rapidly in anticipation of a crack of thunder, interrupting the sound of rain penetrating a collection of lonely pines near the edge of the cemetery. Just beyond the long shadows cast beyond gloomy trees along Locust street a figure comes into full view. Mary dances capriciously upon the grave of her unrivalled faith.