"The Undead Limb of Horace Phelps"

On some bruised corner down one of those fatigued streets, the tarmac worn and cracked and the corners brushed smooth by the movements of all those poor fallen boys and girls, angels measuring their infinite love by the process of putrefaction, the winds of their whispers sneaking along the walls like thieves...

Winter snow, summer rain, winds of autumn,
What news of my love do you bring?

Down that street, on that corner, a boy is waiting. His head is tilted toward the street like he is listening. There isn't much to hear. In those quarters every whisper and every giggle rings sudden and close like a shared secret, or not at all. The air is too dry to carry far; the walls are too porous to bounce back a thing. Soft words and screams alike slither down the stones like bird droppings. The sticky parts cling to the scarred plaster till no-one remembers they weren't part of the original wall; the rest disappears down the gutter by the wheels of the ghostly cars gliding down the streets.

Was there ever a driver?
...That was never a car.

In the glow of the midday smog he is waiting, in the warm glow of the veiled sun and the bluish light shining like a draft through the wounds in the plaster and the cracks in the streets. Even on a hot summer's day the air in the neighborhood carries a chill. The heat leaks out, or something seeps in. The dusty atmosphere sticks to the skin like a drying cold sweat. With his hands in his pockets and his back against the wall the boy on the corner is looking out across the intersection with a blank look - the deep concentration of marble. About his lips whispers the profound hush of nobody home.

Nobody home?

That's right. He's not there. The boy's just a memory, an imprint of one who once was waiting. Someone who stayed too long, who was waiting for something, no one knows what. That part of the story is lost.

What part?
...Was it ever there?

Waiting for a...
...Waiting for a car?

On that corner the hollow shell of the boy who was waiting for a car to take him away. A poor ignorant kid leaning to that starving wall, its dry concrete wounds tasting the salty heat of the young flesh, stealing their way through his skin to rummage inside and slip out the back with his guts.

Couldn't he just leave?
...He was waiting for a car.

What, was he some kind of an idiot?
...It goes without saying.

People usually don't stop around those parts. Lose something there and it's gone. ...Slid down the gutter, caught in a wall... No, people move on because they know. You wouldn't want to find your insides eaten by some starving wall you chanced to linger by, now would you?

No, I wouldn't.

Right. Now, beyond that surface crumbling like gull's faeces and letting off a faint organic smell like the shell of an abandoned egg, inside the hollow carapace of the one time boy: a tunnel.

Ooh!

Yes. Beyond the shell of the kid with the corner of the building growing from between his shoulderblades like a gigantic set of anchoring wings: a secret passage into the guts of the city. An entrance through the layers of depositions, through tarmac to brick to dust, through glass and metal to concrete to wood, through mammal to fish to amoeba.

That far back?

Further.