3.30.2026 - Pedestrian Scum [4]

[13]
He remembered every interaction. Some happened in the mornings when business owners were putting out flags. The guy at the heating and air conditioning place, repurposed as an antique store that sold obsolete heating and air conditioning equipment. Always gave him a friendly wave. He ignored the florist from the yellow flower shop that put out political signs in support of fascists. The redheaded woman from the insurance office screaming Ohmygod is there a spider in my hair? If he weren’t mute already he’d be dumbstruck. She probably thought he was an idiot, or aloof. Ohmygod how many are there? He froze. He watched a horde of spiders spin filaments of silk through the copper wires on her skull, working as a collective, reinforcing their network while she danced around as if stricken with chorea. He tried to gesture with his hands, showing her where they were, unsure about whether to interfere. He stepped backward off the curb to give her some room. Red Honda Civic, 32 mph.

[14]
A milky white prolapse hung over the town, auroras, faint shimmers radiating out toward the bay, rebounding like water at the edge of a bath. The noise of drag racers. He approached a corner, and it went from a hazy late summer evening into a full chorus, like the heart of a machine shop. A motorcyclist, a kid in his mom’s Subaru, a girl with green hair holding her phone at arm’s length and yelling into it, “Oh Yeah, Oh Yeah,” a couple of bucket drummers set up to snare pedestrians, a luggage cart with two rolls of carpet on it. All at once, like someone flipped a switch up there in the room behind the old-fashioned clock on the south wall of the bank building. He knew there was a guy in there. Maybe a woman. Maybe a whole family of clock dwellers. He stopped and squinted, sure he saw some movement behind the minute hand. The son of a local lumber baron had rented a U-Haul pickup truck and was burning and drifting in the parkway while his friends looked on and cheered.

[15]
He came to know the truths of destiny and fate. In the yard he pounded out a chestplate from a discarded muffler.

[16]
The mechanic's on the corner was in the model of an old filling station from the 1950s. Was, in fact, a filling station in the 1950s. Ceramic tile and quaint signage and everything. The rest was all modern lifts and oil stains and a crew of six guys with about twenty teeth between them in dirty jumpsuits who specialized in staring you down like they caught you with a hand in their wife. They had the contract on the postal fleet so there was a corral of a few mail carriers in the lot out front. The trucks and the service were in such bad shape the USPS started deputizing any jerk with wheels and a cleanish background check to run routes for them. Folks in broke-down-ass Astro minivans from forty years ago popping orange flags out the driver’s side window and scrambling out from behind the post office along the river and if you were lucky you saw them before they jumped out from behind the blind corner next to the bridge.