caroline contillo

To walk three long blocks to the north or west was to become surrounded by the skeletal remains of the Industrial Revolution. Low lying abandoned warehouses and functional factories went on for about a mile, drawing a high volume of illegal truck traffic through the scattered residential blocks. Beyond lied a vast cemetery flanked by neat groves of sycamore trees. The entire scene was hemmed in by multiple highways and a 6 lane overpass that hummed deep into the night. . It was a fifteen-minute walk from her door to the bus that went downtown. Most weekdays for the past 8 years she had walked a particular route, the shortest one, to the bus stop. And for the first 6 years, the route remained, at least visually, fairly static. But in recent years, sterile black brick high rises began to shoot forth from empty lots as if a tectonic shift had relieved the earth’s pressure and forced the monstrosities through fissures in the earth’s crust. And there they were, increasing in number like phragmites in noxious estuaries of NJ. The buildings tended to sprout in groups, like the shoots from a node of some architectural rhizome.

In the evening’s magic hour, that time when the sun has dipped below the horizon and the resulting cascade of diffused light renders the city in shades of blue with pink and orange highlights, she would drag a low-slung deck chair up the stairwell and look out upon a thousand rooftops. In the gloaming her mind detached from her body and she imagined that she was granted the power of invisibility. She would then haunt each of the buildings she could see, stealing into the multitudes of homes and offices, regarding the silent dioramas and contemplating life without her body, as a household ghost. She would then often forget herself and begin to hum before being lulled to sleep by the sibilant humming of the highway.