We had big plans for this place.
We built it up, tall, a cathedral to consumerism. We had such ambitions. People were meant to fill this echoing space. This aisle was meant for processions of shoppers. Where have they gone?
Nothing but emptiness. But emptiness is a thing itself.
The mall screams for bodies to fill it, so they do. That was its only purpose – for people to come, to walk, to talk, to sip smoothies, to be enticed into spending money.
Every empty shop, an abandoned prayer niche.
So when the moon shines in through the cracked ceiling tiles, and the breeze disturbs the dust, you can see their forms, the vacant spaces that were begging to be filled. The negative space animates, the afterimage of the crowds.
They go about their business, as if nothing had changed, glowing with moonlight. They wander into a store, just browsing, then come out and move on to the next shop, picking out a beautiful treasure at 75% off. Beaming with pride, they carry their bags, sagging with weightless weight. Their faces are indistinct, their voices do not carry, but they cast shadows, and they continue our traditions.
When was the last time a human set foot in here? When was the last time anybody lived outside these walls?
It doesn’t matter. The foundation has memory. It knows what it was built for. Every strike of the jackhammer was a prayer to its purpose. We imbued it with spirit when we poured the concrete.
This is their city. They will carry on, the force of unrealised intentions, long after the rest of the world has crumbled to dust.
Notes:
“Well, just take a right where they’re going to build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they’re going to put in the freeway, take a left at what’s going to be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they’re thinking of building that drive-in bank. You can’t miss it.”
— Big Science, Laurie Anderson
Takes me right back to my childhood. Not in the city, more like the far reaches of the suburbs, but what might have been a city one day – full of developments, covered in construction sites; some came to fruition, but most didn’t. Dot-com boom and bust, Great Recession, 90s optimism fading away and the consequences sinking in.
It’s probably changed by now. That’s the thing about leaving your hometown – the memory is crystallised. It’s not the same place when I go back to visit. But it’s eternally under construction in my mind.
I remember vast expanses of gray, gravel and dust, “COMING SOON” signs with peeling paint. That whole empty field that was going to be a megachurch. Some day. How many hundreds of times did I drive past it, over the years?
And sometimes things got built and then just abandoned. Those were the saddest: the huge buildings with huge plans that never got to serve their purpose.
Let’s follow that to its logical conclusion.
Joy Gerhardt (they / them) is an immigrant living in the south of England. They have been published in several magazines in the world of knitting design. They enjoy playing with yarn, playing with words, and thinking too much about theatre.