The briefest of introductions: I wrote this as chapter one of a longer piece. I want to work on the next chapter, so I am going to attempt a serial. This story, one chapter at a time.

When the final bell rang, Miguel and his friends would always be the first to throw open the aging wooden doors that led to cracked front steps where weeds would grow if only the useful light could penetrate the permanent smog that hung like used steel-wool over the city.  The doors would slam against the cinder-walls that flanked them with the dull thud of broken wood, a hollow noise that under other circumstances might sound dreary.

To Miguel, that sound was the second movement in the music that begun with the final bell, moved to the beat of the doors against the wall, harmonized by the sound of hundreds of little feet pounding against the worn linoleum halls echoing into the street like a rattlesnake’s rattle would sound if it was slowed with one of those ancient recording devices where you could just put your finger on the disc lightly and the friction would make the sounds warp to a lower timbre.  Next, the verse of he and his friends home-made shoes, bits of tire metal sticking out the sides strapped to dirty feet stamping on the layers of rustling garbage, broken glass, pill bottles, and old newspaper so trampled they looked burned with bone-black edges.

He had always ran with them to his block where they all lived. The day before, an alley he had never really noticed had whispered to him with the slightest whiff of something he could not identify, a seeming absence of decay and filth, which, if he had known the term, he could have called fresh air.  It was so slight, so sudden, and so compelling, that Miguel was pulled into the alley without so much as a hint to his friends who barrelled ahead. At the end of this alley, like a puddle where the filth had settled, was a massive door.

Riveted, metal, with paint like ashes stripping from enamel coated plastic frozen in time. The door had a glass—unbroken glass!—panel, one foot by one foot in dimensions. And it was thick like the piled detritus that made Miguel’s bed. But the glass was clean and perfect and was the newest thing he had ever seen. He stared at it, trying to find imperfection, and for the first time, he understood that imperfection was the second word—the first had been perfection. The concept swarmed his mind the way those rust hornets had swarmed upon his cousin just a few months ago. Perfection was unknown, and not knowing it wasn’t so bad—not when everything was broken and unclean.

His thoughts were interrupted when a light suddenly shone from behind the glass. Only now could he see that the glass was too deep to see through. Behind, only the dullest light, barely penetrating the thickness. He looked closer and closer, until his nose pressed on it, and it seemed to him like the light grew ever so slightly brighter—had the glass become thinner? Had it somehow been squeezed by his attention the way you squeezed a junk-beetle to get it to release it’s nectar?

A great crashing rattled down the alley, the familiar sound of those groups of brutish boys looking for one just like Miguel to find amusement with. He was forced to break away like how attacking rats, losing fast against swinging bats, suddenly turn tail and flee. Even as he rushed through alley and street away from the sound, heart beating with fear, it also beat with something he had never felt before: excitement. What was behind that glass? Did it really get thinner? He laughed as he cleared piles of filth, slid under broken fences, and careened off of shattered concrete barriers. Tomorrow, then. Tomorrow he would return.

© 2016 by James K. Davis