Under The Overpass

It was under the overpass.

There was some neon along the street, the odd letter winking at you. Urban tumbleweeds passed on by until slushy puddles gathered them in like dinosaurs in the tar.

The bass notes were all that made it through the block wall until the door opened up and disgorged the treble registers to clang off the granite blocks that held their own, barely, against the traffic above. Tattered bills, read only by the people that put them there, announced shows long past attended by no one not related.

There was chain link everywhere. Chain link was our version of the Pale. Keeping us in or the others out with little more than a mute reproach. Simple effort would need to be expended to overtop it, and effort being in short supply, they knew it wouldn’t be, and that was enough to keep civilization on a low boil for another day. Chainlink can’t be vandalized. Nothing that can’t be vandalized is a symptom of civilization.

It was a shower with no water inside. The ride cymbal is the only clock. Someone, back in say, the sixties, had ordered an actual mixed drink in there once. He hasn’t been back.