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[FICTION] Tales from Port Astor | Whispers 4

 “Hello caller, you are on the air.”

“I have lived here for about a year now, fleeing the outrageous rent in the Bay area down south. Port Astor? Oh yeah, it’s affordable, but the rent is four-hundred dollars for a fuckin’ reason, pal. This city ain’t right. You ever look at the eyes of people from here? Most of them glassy-eyed, and dead. They wander aimlessly. And the ones that ain’t? There’s something really wrong with them. You got the ones that’ll dome you for looking at them too long, or the real friendly ones. Like, even in the South they’d be pushing it. But here? They stick out like red wine on a wedding dress. I avoid those the most. The angry ones want to attack you, but I don’t know what the hell the smiling ones want.”

“Then, once in a while, you get someone that could pass as normal. I don’t get it. There’s nothing remarkable about them, which is what makes them remarkable. Their normality is abnormal. What the fuck is it? I’m driving down the street, and past the usual hoard of shufflers and yellers, and then my eye instantly goes to the guy in chinos and air pods? Doesn’t he know where he is? How the hell did he get to stay that why? Why does he get to stay that way? Why can’t he be ground down like the rest of us?”

“And the people are only half of it. Then there’s the streets. They don’t act the way they should. They turn in on themselves if you go in any direction long enough; not that they loop, or merge. You drive north on Tills, and then suddenly find yourself going south on Bryn Mawr. I never turned. Shit, I never even stopped at a light. The old brick buildings that are everywhere tint everything in a burnt red, even the lights which were upgraded to that anti-depressant blue color can’t change that. At night, it looks like the city is bleeding from some sort of unknowable stigmata. Are we the whips, or the whipped? Was the city broken before, or did we do something to it? I think the city is alive. And I think it hates us. I hate it, too. I can’t afford to live anywhere else.”

"Thank you, caller."

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