#english141 shortstory fiction
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No. 4
This week's assignment involves describing a city street after having just committed a murder.
Everyone loves to complain about the suburbs. Or maybe that’s no longer true and only applies to sitcoms and American history lectures on the Fifties. There’s just something so pitiable about it – stagnant, idealistic, a quicksand trap for the meek and unambitious. Plastic houses for cookie-cut citizens. A Shangri-La for the 9 to 5 man to store his mannequin wife, his two-and-a-half kids, and his integrity. Someone once called it “the final battleground of the American dream”. That was Harlan Coben, I think. He was wrong though because nothing about this place is a battleground; it’s everything but. Not quite heaven on earth, but a spoiler at least, and with that model home feel to it. It’s just all too perfect.
Look, you can stand here, just like this, right in the middle of the road and see it. Let your eyes follow the painted stripe all the way down and all the way back and then look to either side: uncanny symmetry. You could place a mirror along this line and it couldn’t be more exact. The black tarmac flows evenly to both sides and ends in two equidistant shores of gray cement. Driveways form neat beaches that rise into corresponding palaces, each surrounded by trim lawns and joined by tidy sidewalks. I salute the nearest tree, a scrawny sentinel still too young to be any good at his job, but I can see that they all are – one in each yard, evenly spaced apart, guarding empty fortresses. Every house is the same; some are just painted or shaped a little different. Some houses can be one story or two stories but they are still the same.
There is no one around. If I look down at my watch, at the red hands, I will know why. It’s noon on a weekday, when the everyman is out and about, away at work or running errands, the kids at school, etc. But even still, when would you see them? People live between doors; from the entrance of their homes and into their cars, they are seen for only a moment before they disappear. Maybe it’s better this way, with invisible neighbors. People are ignorant and dull and self-obsessed. They’re only concerned with their own problems, how their suit looks when it’s starched and pressed, how their makeup hangs to their faces and their hair sprouts from their fragile skulls. People can be so cruel and unforgiving. They can do terrible things to each other.
So maybe I like how bland the suburbs are. I like that nothing thrilling ever happens, how every day is a continuation of the last. It’s better this way. It makes you believe the world is a quiet place. Not entirely silent, not dead, but with like a low register hum that makes you stop and stand still to hear it. I can taste the springtime here. Birds chirping from the nearby trees. Cats disappearing beneath cars. Anxious red hands. How the sun fills your eyes with too much brilliance, laying a veil over everything it touches like a photograph with the contrast reduced. The suburbs are a banquet for the senses. The distant sound of a lawnmower. The nauseating smell of iron. A cool breeze picking up and then vanishing. The roaring of sirens. Blood red hands. It’s hot and the sun is moving slowly in the cloudless sky; I set my knife down on the warm pavement and take off my coat.
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