Rubble

The sky looked like static on a TV screen, snow flying so fast that it hurt the eyes to focus on any single flake. Kate attempted to do so, nonetheless. Tears froze to her face and the tips of her eyelashes.

         Her faded jeans were soaked through and ready to freeze solid as her shoelaces had already done. They looked peculiar, the laces, as if stopped in motion. Kate could not resist prodding the upright bow on her left shoe and the lace cracked like it was made of glass.

         At first she skittered on the ice and now she trudged through the deep heavy snow. Kate did both walks impartially and quickly. Other less proficient snow trudgers, silhouetted black just a few feet away, braced themselves against the steady rush of wind and walked slowly, the way they would underwater on a seabed.

         There was a peculiar hush. Kate could not hear her classmates footsteps and cars sped by next to the sidewalk without forewarning noise. She closed her eyes so that they would not incur further damage from flying snow and continued the march.

         The clouds began to melt away finally and blue spread. Kate was almost home when she paused.

         There was an endless fence to her right. On the other side was some type of warehouse, impossibly large and looming. The walls consisted entirely of glass windows, fogged with dust and age.

         Kate pressed her face up against the fence. There was more than one building, she realized: metal bridges, high up, connected them, leaving immense spaces of grey concrete paving in between, uninterrupted by even a blade of grass. A cobweb constructed by humans with steel.

         “Get away from the fence!” an elementary school aged boy ran up to Kate, wringing his hands in terror.

         Kate jumped away from it in shock.

         “Why? What’s wrong with the fence?” she asked, immediately irritated.
         The boy stared at her and it seeming taken aback. Hesitantly, he raised his hand and touched the metal wire.

         “What?” asked Kate again.

         “My parents work in that building over there. They said… the fence is electric.”

         “Maybe it’s turned off,” she Kate.

         The boy nodded.

         Then he climbed over it.

         “What are you doing?” yelled Kate.

         The five echoes of her voice unnerved her with their famously mocking precision. The boy turned around and looked back. His red hair glowed against the murk of the decrepit edifices. He was small and thin to the point of surrealness in the immensity of it. The sun was now burning and light seared down in the shadowless patch where he stood, causing him to blink repeatedly.

         “Is there something wrong with me visiting my parents at work?” he asked.

         They both knew there was something and they both knew that they both knew, so Kate did not reply.