Last time Ashley looked the sun was setting. Now it was set, gone, vanished, evacuated, and the streets and buildings that made great photos earlier were simply dark and forbidding.
The images wouldn’t have the same appeal with a flash.
The Concord Club Urban Explorers Tour ended hours earlier, but when the bus dropped her off at the parking lot she had to come back.
She had seen and heard about the “ruin porn,” but experiencing it up close was different. She felt the spirits of the people who worked in the factories and cooked dinner in the houses.
A little panic started crawling up her pant leg when she realized she didn’t know exactly where her car was.
Ashley put her camera back in her bag, shaking her head at herself, in the dark, that she had been naive enough to believe the streetlights would come on in a neighborhood like this.
Was this a neighborhood anymore? Or just the ghosts of economic and racial strife haunting in faded brick, discarded cars and even boats.
She made a left where she thought she needed to make a left, vaguely recognizing where she had wandered.
Reaching for her phone, for a light, a noise startled her so badly that she dropped the phone. The noise again–a train horn– drowned the sound of the phone skittering across the pavement that grass and weeds were trying to reclaim.
Ashley scanned the street, didn’t see a phone.
With a calming breath, she backtracked, pulled her camera from her bag and snapped a flash shot of the ground.
The digital image, enlarged, showed her phone against the curb, so close to the storm drain it really could have been a disaster.
She kept walking the way she thought she was supposed to walk when red flashing lights both scared and warmed her.
Her instant reaction was emergency vehicle, but it was the railroad crossing, something she had ignored in favor of the graffitied hulks that used to be manufacturing plants.
She figured if the lights had been an emergency vehicle, that someone safe was around. A passing freight train, headed to or from wherever the manufacturing had moved, well…not so much.
She walked toward the train, knowing at least that she wasn’t lost, lost, but separated from her car by the train.
Ashley walked closer to a white brick wall that said oultry in blue, professionally painted letters;the P and the rest of the wall victims of time and neglect. Flush to the wall she felt safer, though it was silly to think a random assailant would show up on deserted streets.
Oultry stared back at her, so she snapped it with a flash, the light echoing in her retinas, and kept walking.
There was another flash.
It didn’t come from inside her head, but outside, to her right, past the wall.
A small fire had ignited in a vacant field.
A figure hunched next to it.
Ashley looked up at the train. She couldn’t see the end, but saw enough of it to know it was a long one.
A long slow one.
She could turn and walk the other way, but where? There was a freeway, a few miles in the distance, maybe a gas station…
Jeezus, Ashley, it’s one person trying to warm themselves by a fire. Jeezus. Stand near the train and wait for it to pass.
Stepping until she was even with the fire, and the person, she hesitated.
Say hello?
“You lost.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement.
“Hi,” Ashley said, the greeting that she had in her head before the person spoke.
“Hu-low,” the person said, hesitating, like the greeting was a chore they’d rather not bother with.
The train was still across the intersection, no end that Ashley could see on the horizon.
She walked toward the person and the fire, one part of her brain telling her not to and thinking about the gifted pepper spray in the junk drawer in the condo. The other part of her brain said that she should introduce herself, that the person was probably harmless.
Ashley hesitated again, remembering some safety thing about the less a stranger knowing about you the better.
The man stared into the fire.
“Fires sure are relaxing,” Ashley said.
The silent pause ate most of the light that the small flame created.
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