Moving On

It was a joyful experiment, but Middling was fast becoming a ghost town — full of the ghosts of hopes and dreams.

Photo by Atul Pandey on Unsplash

I looked back, over my shoulder, at the town of Middling. You see things differently: The shabby soot on the train station’s siding. The sagging roof over the bar. Cracks in the pavement. The town’s Poet Laureate, sleeping it off in an alley.

When I’d stepped off the train, six months — maybe a year ago — my eyes seemed to focus differently; I’d seen “quaint” and “charming.” I’d seen delicate wildflowers shoving aside glistening asphalt, widening the cracks in their determination. I’d squinted against the sunlight reflecting off the windows of the General Store, which doubled as a bustling art gallery.

Middling was an experiment, and it had hummed with the energy of a Tesla coil.

But now, no sunlight glinted against the glass; no light penetrated a thick layer of grime and dust. The Middling Mural had already faded from the Motley Pen, the town’s bed and breakfast, where each of us took turns frying up bacon or flipping gluten-free pancakes. “Flippin’ hippies,” we’d joked. Back then, we’d run barefoot down Main Street for the sheer joy of it. Now, most of the town’s residents simply couldn’t afford the shoe leather. The mural, cracked with a deep Y-shaped chasm…