Rubber City Ruins Read online

  He spent a good deal of time that late summer morning splashing in a rather deep rain puddle that had formed at the end of a long gravel driveway. With happy fluffed feathers, he rolled around in the water that had been warmed by the sun. The sparrow took great pleasure in how the water felt against his skin. For the remainder of the day, the sparrow flew around the town with the strange and abandoned structures that didn’t seem to belong to anyone. He cleaned his beak on the cross that was affixed to the roof of a church.

  The sparrow felt free exploring the world without being encumbered by live power lines, cars, malicious people, poisonous foods, and pollution. Everything was clean; everything was open, and there wasn’t much time to worry or be scared. This particular sparrow knew nothing of the dangers his ancestors faced. Being a small and frail and meek creature and sharing the same planet as humans wasn’t always easy. But this sparrow knew nothing of that life.

  It was a good time to be a bird.

  As he splashed around in a new puddle he found, he had no idea of what the world used to look like. His ancestors that used to share the planet with people didn’t know just how wonderful the world could be. They didn’t know what it was like to not have to worry about getting run over with a car. They didn’t know what breathing in air that wasn’t contaminated. Everything was bright and clear and most of all- it was quiet.

  He decided to spend the early afternoon singing on the roof of a trailer, until he spotted an open door to one of the trailers. What a fun adventure that would be! Many of the old structures that peppered the anemic landscape were closed up tight. He would sometimes fly up to one of the windows and peer inside and admire all of the fascinating objects that were scattered about, but he was never able to get inside. With a confident jump, he flew down off of the roof and through the front door of the yellow trailer. He landed on a pile of clothes that were being occupied by a woman lying on a bed. Her skin was pink and perfectly intact, and she felt warm against his slender talons. He had never seen anything quite like her before. The woman stirred, and the unexpected movement started the bird, and it flew out of the door and down the street.

  An electric current shot through the woman's entire body. Her mouth felt sour and metallic as her tongue pressed firmly against the roof of her mouth, and she waited for the current to pass. After it had subsided, her body buzzed and hummed and limbs would involuntarily jerk and burn. Light flooded her eyes and her blurry vision focused on a faded yellow ceiling with missing tiles that exposed metal pipes. Her body felt stiff as she sat upright and looked around the dim room.

  The room was small. It felt about the same size as her bedroom at home, maybe a little bit bigger. The door was open and the handle was stuck in the drywall as if it had been opened violently. There were broken mini blinds on each of the three windows that occupied each wall. They cast long, dislocated beams of light onto the stained, pea green shag carpet. In the corner of the room was a desk with a computer monitor and a small stack of papers. She walked over to the desk and picked up a stack of the papers, about to leaf through them when she noticed the bright red spatter against the wall by the floor. Below the splatter was a man wearing a black polo shirt with an embroidered “AI-X” symbol on the pocket and bloodied khakis. There were deep, clotted gashes on his face and arms. Despite the horrid condition on the man’s body, his face is what she couldn’t shake from her mind. Even though the life had clearly been drained from him, he still looked terrified. His eyes were open and cloudy, and his jaw hung open as if it’s hinges were broken, exposing his crooked bottom row of teeth. She dropped the files onto the floor as she backed up toward the open door. Looking down, she noticed that there were droplets of blood on her beige cargo jacket.

  “Where the hell am I?” Her voice quivered. The last thing that she had remembered was going in for a CAT scan to rule out tumors being the cause of her migraines. Rick had made her go because she had run her car into a guardrail and broke her leg. “Wait…” She clasped both hands around her leg. The cast was gone. She put all of her weight on her leg and found it strong and sturdy- maybe even more than before she broke it.

  “Ok Anna... get a grip.” She ran trembling hands through her brown hair. “What’s the last thing you remember? Think…” She began to list instances as she was reading them off of a teleprompter hanging on the wall. “Rick drove you to the hospital for that stupid CAT scan. You sat in the waiting room until Nurse Weirdo took you to the basement. You changed into a hospital gown and Dr. Moreno came out. You laid down in the machine… it was cold… the air felt thick…” She pounded on her head in frustration. “Think… what else?! Who’s that guy? Where’s Rick?” She walked out of the small building and took in the landscape before her. It didn’t look immediately familiar, but it resembled one of the many the rural farming towns on the outskirts of Akron. There was a long gravel driveway before her that gave way to a road punctuated by telephone poles, mailboxes, and nothing more. There were no cars coming from either direction for as far as she could see. There were no audible traces of traffic either- just the distant sounds of birds and the wind passing through the trees.

  “The trees... are green…” Anna distinctly remembered when she went into the hospital it was late October and the trees were almost bare. “What month… Jesus… what year is it? This… can’t be real.”

  She needed to find someone who would be able to shed some light on her situation. They might not be able to tell her how she wound up in what looked like a modular home in the middle of farm country, but they could at least tell her what day it was and possibly help her get home.

  To her west, there didn’t look to be much in terms of habitation. There was a tall grain silo that was attached to an old dairy barn, and a large farmhouse. There were no cars in the driveway, and it didn’t look as if anyone lived there. To her east, there were a few similar modular homes, and what looked to be a church in the distance. As she walked down the middle of the flat two lane road, she considered venturing down the long driveway of one of the smaller houses and knocking on the door. They looked as if they were still lived in- there were clothes hanging on clotheslines, cars parked in the driveway, and curtains in the windows. One even had a cat sitting on the front porch licking its paw. But Anna imagined that they would have a negative reaction to a woman with splattered blood on her jacket asking them what day it was and if she could swing a ride back to the city. The thought was so absurd that it made her laugh out loud to herself. The sound of her laugh was so loud against the silence that the cat on the porch dashed under one of the cars.

  “You’ve lost your mind, Anna.” She smiled and shook her head. “You actually did have a tumor and the CAT scan made it explode. Now you’re a vegetable in some hospital while the tumor forces you down some weird rural rabbit hole.”

  The parking lot of the church was empty for the exception of a station wagon with wooden panels and four flat tires parked in the last spot. She walked up the front steps and wondered how many brides had walked down those very steps, and she wondered how many families carried caskets down those steps. All of the pivotal moments that define what it’s like being human happen exactly where she was standing. Maybe there was someone inside that could help her.

  She opened the door and was immediately hit by a smell that was unfamiliar but, on a primal level, knew exactly what it was. On a drop-down screen meant for a projector were the words Went to Rapture spray-painted in big black letters. She walked down the center aisle- like those many brides and many caskets before her- and found the source of smell still sitting in the pews. They were wearing their Sunday best- colorful blazers and skirts with stubby black heels and matching purses and hats that were paired with black and grey suits and ties. They were so badly decayed that most of the heads had snapped off and lay on the floor around their shoes. At the pulpit was a man in a suit who was lying on his back with a Bible and wilted brown flowers on his chest.

  She turned to face the congregation of wel
l-dressed and headless corpses, admiring how the light coming through the stained-glass windows cast colorful shadows. Without saying a word, without bothering to investigate the back rooms of the church, she walked back down the aisle and carefully closed the door behind her. A panicked breath escaped from the bottom of her stomach as she collapsed on the steps and cradled her head in her hands.

  As Anna continued down the long-abandoned road, she became increasingly aware of the gravity of the situation in which she found herself. She took off her bloodied cargo jacket and left it along the side of the road. Inhaling deeply, she went back to one of the smaller houses with the cars in the driveway and a clothesline in the back yard and found that it, too, was empty. Thankfully, there were no dead bodies inside, and that made it easier to riffle through their belongings looking for answers.

  She tried to turn on the small television that was propped up on an old TV tray, but there was no power. The floor of the living room was littered with crushed cigarette packs and opened mail envelopes. She bent over and picked up one of the envelopes off of the floor and flipped it over. It read: Danita Jones 12390 Congress Road Wooster OH 44691.

  “Wooster?” She said dropping the envelope and looking out the window. “How did I get all the way out here?” She was familiar with Wooster- she toured the local college once. It was about 40 miles west of Akron.

  On the floor, next to the heavily soiled blue plaid sofa with torn cushions, was a landline telephone with a knotted cord. She picked it up. There wasn’t even a dial tone or a busy signal or a disconnect message. Just silence with an occasional and unsettling click.

  To the right of the living room was a small kitchen with a round table with three chairs. There were dirty, mismatched dishes that were piled up in the sink and spilled out onto the counter tops. All of the cabinets doors were opened, exposing only a few cans of food and open boxes of cereal. On the kitchen table were papers- shoe boxes filled with folded pieces of paper, greeting cards, school notebooks with notes from a low-level math class, class pictures, grocery lists, and love poems written on yellowed notebook paper. Without feeling a need of urgency, Anna combed through every single document on that table. It was mostly medical bills, and final notices for bills that weren’t being paid. There were a lot of advertisements and coupons that were for pizza and fried chicken. But there was one advertisement that was printed on unusually thick card stock that had been torn in half. Anna held both of the pieces together and read: Afraid that you have no future? Worried about the government? Up to your neck in debt? Feeling sick and tired? Suffering from an incurable disease? Join us at Greener Pastures and we will take away your pain. Call us at 1-888-555-1267. The phone number had been circled with an arrow and a smiley face pointing to it. The image behind the text was a scene of a small child sitting on a grassy knoll at sunset looking up at the first few stars that were shining above him.

  Before heading back outside, Anna took one last glance around the room for places she had perhaps overlooked. That’s when she noticed it hanging off the edge of the kitchen counter top: a set of car keys. In the driveway were three different cars- a pickup truck, an old sedan, and a Jeep. “Come on jeep,” she said, grabbing the keys off of the counter before she walked out into the driveway.

  Much to her chagrin, it didn’t start the Jeep. It started the pickup truck and just barely. She figured she would ‘borrow it’ for as long as it could take her, and then find another car or preferably a person to take her the rest of the way. She followed the signs that led her east to Akron. Her stomach began to sink as the rural farmland blended into clusters of suburban houses- all just as empty and abandoned as the previous. And as clusters of suburban homes turned into businesses and factories and grids of urban houses, the landscape charged from ‘peaceful and abandoned’ to ‘violently uprooted and destroyed’. She stopped the car next to the bright blue Welcome to The Rubber City! Akron, OH population 198,200 sign and stood next to her idling truck.

  The Akron skyline was always modest and small but each building was unique. As Anna looked upon it in that moment, it looked as if it were a haunted ghost town. Some of the buildings looked as if they had been burned down, and the buildings that remained were unkempt and consumed with ivy and moss. Narrow trees shot up from between cracks in the sidewalk and on rooftops. Along the remaining smaller buildings were signs written hastily in big bold letters that read things such as Project Fawcett is Real and Hammond=Hitler and AIX was Hired by SATAN.

  Anna held a pensive breath firmly in the bottom of her chest as she scanned the horizon. She imagined all of the people who occupied her city and tried to imagine what could have happened to leave the city in such ruins. The streets were broken and jagged and cars parked along the side of the road were covered with a dense layer of weather and dust. How could everything just be gone? It felt as if nothing could pull her focus from searching for answers among the city ruins, until a robin landed on the Welcome to Akron sign. It cocked its head from side to side, and shuffled down the sign’s edges to investigate Anna closer. She stretched her arm out to pet it, and the bird jumped off of the sign and landed on her forearm. It continued to study Anna, who stood rigidly still, and once it was satisfied with what it learned, it pushed off of her arm and flew away.

  She watched as it disappeared into the leaves of a tree, and then looked back to the city. There was no telling how long she had been gone. “I have to get home. I have to find Rick.” She said, as she jumped back into the truck and drove away.

  Chapter 3

  The roads leading away from the city were covered in debris and were difficult to navigate. It was as if a tornado had swept up all the town’s lawn furniture, scrap metal, tools, and cars and scattered them throughout the neighborhoods. Everything looked different, and Anna kept getting lost even though she drove down those very same roads every day of her life. The gas station where she would get gas on her way to work was completely destroyed and the awning over the gas pumps had toppled over on top of a few parked cars. The Mexican restaurant that she and Rick would go to on Friday nights was boarded up tight with the words Betrayal spray-painted in big black letters on the boarded double doors. The laundromat, the music store, and the used car lot were all tightly boarded and covered in similar graffiti.

  As she pulled up to the intersection of Market and Canton, she saw the old familiar Ellet Elementary School sign out of the corner of her eye. She was at least 10 minutes away from her house, yet there was something pulling her to her old place of employment. If Rick was, in fact, waiting for her at home, he could wait just a moment longer as she investigated what had happened to her school.

  The banner under the sign wasn’t covered in graffiti and had a very uplifting message. It read: A Person’s a Person, No Matter How Small. Anna smiled, wondering which faculty member decided to put a quote on the front sign. Principal Duggar, despite many pleas from the teachers, refused to put anything on that front sign other than dates of PTA meetings and days off.

  Anna pulled up to where the busses picked up students at the front door and parked. As she circled around the front of the truck to the doors, she was suddenly aware of how quiet it was. Typically, the front of the school brought a myriad of noises: students talking and laughing, a distant car radio, busses idling, and the occasional announcement on the PA system. Even on days when there were no classes the school still felt alive. There were always cars pulling in and out of the parking lot, students skateboarding on the empty lot and heading to the playground and cars driving up and down Market Street. At that moment, Anna was enveloped in an uneasy silence. The only sounds filling the void were birds. There were so many birds singing, even songs that didn’t sound familiar to her. Perhaps it just sounded like there were more birds because there were no other competing sounds, but Anna could not block out the dominant songs.

  The front door was propped open with a wooden wedge like it typically was throughout the school day. As she pulled it open, the scent of pen
cil shavings and worn carpet made her smile. After a day of navigating through her hometown streets that were so broken and foreign, it felt good to be somewhere that had remained unchanged. It felt like going back a week after school let out for the summer to pick up her last paycheck. The air was balmy and warm and the trees were their brightest green. Even the grass was overgrown as it had a tendency to get in the summer because Principal Duggar refused to pay for lawn maintenance when school wasn’t in session.

  It was strange, however, to see the Christmas tree in the front hallway on such a hot day. It was the exact same tree the staff put up every year. As Anna walked up to it to inspect the ornaments that were hanging off of the branches, she noticed the ‘Art of the Month’ wall was filled, floor to ceiling, with drawings and paintings. The title of the wall, that was made from different colored construction paper letter cut-outs, read Dedicated to Those We Have Lost. Drawing on top of drawing depicting a different version of the same thing: a picture of a family member from the hands of a child. Some were drawn with angel wings, or sitting on top of a white cloud surrounded by other people. In the bottom right corner closest to the door was a picture that had deep red and yellow colors that stood out against the cool shades of the childlike visions of heaven. Anna bent over, plucked it off of the wall, and examined it. It was a picture of a man who was wearing glasses, a blue necktie, holding a briefcase in one hand and a bottle in the other, surrounded by flames. In the distant background was a red creature with horns and a pitchfork who was smiling. She turned it over and a laugh escaped her mouth when she read who the artist was. David Williamson, in memory of my dad. Anna had David as a student two years ago, and he was one of those students that she would never forget.