The Mall

This place is dead and I walk on its corpse. Decaying, the lifeblood falling from the fading floors that line the mall, my footsteps echoing on its bones.

Bones.

I can hear them. They creak as the old people walk down the halls, harmonized to the tap of their canes. I can see them. The way they nod to each other, or sometimes, at the empty wall. Ghosts still walk here, but only in their minds. Fewer and fewer every year.

I seek youth. Three children, racing around their parents' ankles in a tired and sagging plastic playground, well past its expiration date. Do they know they’re walking in a graveyard? When they shout and laugh, do the echoes of the voices that are no longer here haunt them? Is this their normal?

This place is a prison. Iron bars line the walls, but am I the prisoner? Or the guard, standing watch at the forgotten chairs, the empty shelves, the wires that fall out of the walls.

An opening. People. Teenagers shifting through the shelves, uncomfortably glancing around and wondering if they should be somewhere else. A bored cashier, glancing at the old analog clock, wondering when she can go home. But they’re people all the same. The last gasps of air in the rot.

Rot spreads. One day, I will walk through my town and it will be a skeleton. Why does it always come back to bones? Is that what we all are? Bones on a deadline, a walking corpse on a ticking clock?

I take my bag. I walk out the doors. And I run.

The gravestone is all that’s left. An empty mall.