Every city has them. Liminal spaces; ruined spaces; forgotten spaces. Sacramento was no different.
This forgotten space was folded away in a neglected corner where the rot ran deep. Beaten roller doors guarded the vacant, tomb like structures. Houses were shrunken, sunk in misery behind bowed fences with peeling paint, enfeebled vegetation and chain link that spoke of poverty and a decay that went beyond the purely physical. Weeds pushed up through the cracks in the sidewalk; the road was pitted and scarred with half formed pot-holes. Rubbish grew in secluded corners or else scattered itself lovingly across the empty streets.
A neglected and blackened pair of shoes hung limply from a power line.
At the heart of the malaise was a small strip mall. Withered now, it squatted low and small, surrounded by its grubby - and very empty - parking lot. Glass glittered underfoot. Windows stared, hollow eyed, out into the street and revealed yawning depths within the crumbling remnants of shop space too far gone to be worth anything. There was no security here and the rear doors of the shops were loose and broken.
Grafitti plagued the mall, both within and without. Even long after the rains there was an annoying steady drip from... somewhere. At some point some people had been using the place as a refuge, given the detritus - and that despite the squalid damp of the place and its spooky ambience: the larger shop space had once been a supermarket of some stripe and was all empty shelves, rubbish, and the dumping ground for all manner of broken things; the next shop along had been a clothing store and had sprouted a colony of mannikins, complete with tarps, bedding and drug paraphernalia.
Such is the sorry scene.
There is someone still here though. Hark! Tinkling of glass! Rattle and thud as something is dislodged, and in its languid fall, causes a chain reaction of cascading junk to rumble and jingle. The sound cuts into the silence like the brutal blade of an angry Uruk.
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