Author: Rachel Sievers
It is unlikely that many people would leave here. This one-horse town as I’ve heard it called time and time again. Families and neighbors know since birth to walk down the concrete sidewalks. It is cemented in time as a place where the fifties values have yet to give way to the free love and exploration of the sixties. It is black and white and slightly snowy if seen from the outside. Visitors would not be surprised to see high ponytails with perfect curls and poodle skirts.
This is the place I walk down the little town streets that have curved metal light posts and perfectly painted signs. I walk in the dead of night the stars twinkle, shine and are visible to the naked eye. No one leaves their porch lights on, break ins rare, and only occurred to anyone’s memory when a few hoodlums from the next town over came in vengeance for the stomping the football team gave them.
I walk on in silence and stillness, a lone survivor in a post-apocalyptic world. I take it in, this place untouched by time. I know it is her domain, the perfection is timeless and I smile. She just can’t help it, she likes things too perfect, too pristine.
A memory of our time slips into my mind. Reading a coveted book by the firelight. An ancient time when books were few and far between, written in the hand of monks, instead of printed in the press. Our packs under our bodies the damp smell of earth under our bodies, a mess of twigs and branches we would eventually burn through the night, a messed pile across the firelight. I am mid-sentence reading to her and she stands. Her graceful feet moved towards the pile. She organizes it. Smallest twigs on the top, largest branches on the bottom. I don’t stop reading but a smile creeps onto my face. Sitting next me we continue our night of firelight and stories.
I stop in the street and take a deep breath. Even the air has a fresh smell, fall leaves and cut grass both mixing in a gentle smell. I know she has left here, small signs have started to creep in. A spiderweb crack in the concrete, a light post with a burnt-out light, things she would never let be while she was here.
I was close. I lifted my nose to the air and took another deep breath and thought I caught a faint scent of lilacs. “Hello my dear,” I said to the dark, “I’m close now. Soon, so very soon.”
I turned on my heel and left the town intact. I will not destroy it, I will let the people do that. One can only stay in a cage for so long before they start to pull out their feathers. I walk down the dark streets following the scent of the lilacs and smile, we will be together soon.