American Catacombs
In the dim chambers of the lowest levels of the parking garage dwells eternal somnolent twilight. It is cold, too; the kind of cold that seeps from the corners of places entombed in deep earth.
Things which fall here remain here. There is no rain to wash away the spilled coffee, dried into long sticky drips that stretch toward the center of the floor. No friendly disinfecting sunshine can undo the collecting or molding of misplaced, forgotten items. Instead objects are mummified, fossilized, everything being dried and pressed and dusted into a uniform concrete gray. An old apple carelessly dropped out of the flow of creeping traffic is now a wrinkled wad, its color and vitality sublimated, as it oozes into partial union with the floor.
There is a drain, but if the rain ever falls hard enough to touch this place, the water runs UP instead of DOWN. The single round grate, intended as a point of exit, rushes and gargles under inbound pressure, a burbling fountain of runoff and dried leaves, as the things above push their way down, struggle to get here, vie for their own, so to speak, parking space.
It is a vault, a modern catacomb, an unnatural cave. The darkness rests here. It whispers to you in the hissing of cars passing overhead. It asks you to stay.
Great vivid descriptions, Sarah! Really pulls the reader in 🙂
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Thank you Tom!
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Sarah,
Whether you intended it or not, I know people who this perfectly describes. Mona
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH {giggle}
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Haha… eh, heh… wait…
Wait.
O_O
nooooooooooomigod
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Awesome 👏
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Makes me wonder about the future, about what future people will think of our structures, our debris, our lives that included these things. What a creepy place that will feel like then if it’s so creepy now!
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They’re haunted now! In the future people will probably find them quaint and charming, especially after nature has roughed them up a bit, and the sunlight breaks in.
Just think: one day people will find old derelict highways to be quaint and charming. O_0
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Fantastic, Sarah!! I’ll never be able to be blissfully ignorant in a parking garage ever again…
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Thanks, E.S! However, I didn’t really ruin them. MONA DID.
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WHAAAAAATTTTTT!!!!!! I ruined…nothing. I tell you…it was nothing. Dah-link!
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OMG I’m rolling!!! (it’s not difficult… i’m kinda round anyway… ) You guys are too much! HA!
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😂
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