"Can I call you Evie-poo?"

This is my friend's thing she had to write for her artsy-fartsy school. Enjoy.

Lauren Turner

On the corner of 8th Avenue and River Street there is a bus shelter. No buses ever come here anymore, but they never took the shelter down. It sits next to a steep hill, where nothing ever grows except thorn bushes among the broken beer bottles. This neighborhood is definitely no Pleasantville; the houses across from the shelter show this clearly. Their windows are boarded with plywood and their grey brick fronts are crumbling into dust. The neon graffiti writing on the bus shelter’s glass windows are like screaming signs, warning you not to continue down this road. The graffiti writers have since vaporized into thin air, like the owners of the abandoned houses.

One of the houses has a dull number thirty-two still hanging on rusting nails to the front door. Its door is painted a deep crimson but it’s fading and the paint around the door handle is beginning to peel at its corners. There’s a stained glass panel with a sun design at the top of this door. It is the last reminder of how these houses once were. If I told you these houses were once a few of the most beautiful in the city, would you believe me? Would you look at the front lawns with their flowering yellow weeds and red vines that snake up the walls and be unable to see past them?

The air always seems heavier in this place, like the sky is pushing down on you. Maybe it’s the unnamed fear that surrounds here, and makes it hard to breathe. Only under the bus shelter’s roof does the air seem to part and you can breath again. Your mind plays tricks on you, making you believe that this structure can protect you against whatever it is that your afraid of. You sit in there reading the messages on the walls, waiting for the courage to leave this sanctuary (?).

The metal polls holding the bus shelter to the cement of the sidewalk are bent, leaning far to the left. It always looks as if the polls are folding under the weight of the roof and the shelter is going to come crashing down as you stand inside it. In the back of your mind, you know the old poles with their chipped red paint will stand to see another one more day. All the couples that have ever been in that bus station have craved their names into the poles. You find yourself wondering if AD still loves MS or if it was just a summer fling like so many romances are.

All the carvings are at least ten years old now. The buses stopped making this stop when the people in the gray houses left. There’s still a rusted pink tricycle with torn ribbons dangling from its handles in the yard in front of one of them. Maybe its owner was planning to return again to her house. She never has. None of them ever have. It was all over the news ten years ago, but people forget things so quickly or just choose not to speak of them.

People hardly ever walk down this road. If they do they always walk swiftly past, some of them run, pretending not to see, but no one ever lingers here. A wall of spruce trees blocks the gray houses from the neighborhood on 9th Avenue and the highway that rushes past them. Their pointed tops jet threateningly into the bright blue sky. You can never understand how such a beautiful sky can hang over such a street. In the end it’s it sky that gives you the courage to leave the safe confines of the bus shelter. It’s so bright and welcoming it tempts you out from under your hiding spot. Every child in this city has been taught to fear the gray houses. They fear the secrets they hold and the ghosts of lives that were once lived happened on this street.

"A murder is just an extroverted suicide."