He stood beside the excavator trying to look resolute but felt silly in his hard hat, squinting and scrunching up his face, nearly blinded by the sun as it crossed the horizon, its light bouncing off the East River and through the gaps in the neighboring buildings to illuminate the soon to be empty lot. He wished he’d brought his shades but consoled himself with his relative superiority. His teeth were glowing white, his skin nearly unlined, his clothing tailored, his stomach flat. He shook hands with the rough edged foreman and the heavy machine operator.
He was 42 and tearing down what was left of a tenement building, reducing a decomposing mural on one side to dust, so he could sell the lot to developers. You cannot landmark a pile of rubble. Whatever the community board’s hopes for the artwork on the southern wall, their action plan was getting crushed.
He was one of the first to hear about the discord surrounding the mural in the tenement district. A little bird sang its song into his ear and he flew off to the bank. He bought it and had already scheduled the closing date for its sale. Fifteen million in profits. He was subconsciously rewriting the story from a chance encounter into a shrewd response to his boots on the ground research.
The mural was painted for the immigrant community who populated the tenement houses a hundred years ago. It depicted the neighborhood people. On their clothing and in the sky were elaborate geometric designs – The Tree of Life, the 50 Gates of Bina, the Ten Sefirot. Time and weather had taken nearly half of it off the wall. Much of its destruction was caused by clogged gutters. He was to dispose of what was left of the mural so that future luxury condominium owners could avoid the uncomfortable reminder of poverty and those that needed God to help them.
He was a realist. Pragmatic. No one could argue that every wall in the city that had ever been tagged must remain upright until the cultural significance of the scripts and images were discerned. Parts of Manhattan would end up looking like Gaza or Ukraine. This was a city with enough power to control destructive forces and too little time for decay.
He felt relief and pride. He would be less reliant on his family’s trust because of this deal. It was the type of thing every real estate investor in the city dreamt of. Everyone would want to know how he’d found it. He stood, breathing in his achievement, unknowingly inhaling some of the billion particles of dust that the excavator began releasing into the air.
• • •
The southern facade crumbled.
Dust rose above debris and began to swirl out over the plywood barriers.
Gusts of wind channeled it through the surrounding glass and steel.
It drifted toward the ocean.
One by one the particulars fell.
They were ingested by the land and the sea.
The dust became diffuse and then cellular and existed within individual living units and through them became a part of death and decay.
And all the words of the believers who passed when it was whole,
those that stood and prayed,
or walked and prayed,
and those that didn’t even know that they were praying,
and the eyes of the painter and his visions,
would go where the dust went.
It would be as they believed, never ending.
• • •
In the coming years he sought similar deals and invested his profits, but research and prudent financial stewardship never replicated the rush of destruction and that subsequent windfall. He never performed the disappearing act again, but he desperately wanted other people to believe that he could, like a child wanting to believe they possessed magical powers.
Decades passed predictably. He was losing his hair. His money was tied up in various projects of middling success. The trust was depleted. He was struggling to care for his dementia stricken father.
He couldn’t justify his company’s excessive square footage of Class A office space and decided to downsize. His assistant found a picture of the old mural when they were packing up the contents of his filing cabinets. She thought it might have sentimental value and placed it on his desk before she left for the day.
Working late, the sun setting, he picked up the photograph and squinted to see some words in the bottom corner, perhaps the artist’s signature. It said Ayin-Yesh.
All the sure things were falling away. He sat down to examine it. He looked into the picture, into one weary woman’s eyes, and from deep in his lungs escaped a hundred year old prayer.
He was inside the woman as a girl, chasing after another girl, a woolen skirt pulled up above her knees, the soles of her oxfords slapping the sidewalk. A man pushing a cart stacked high with boxes of vegetables blocked their passage and they slowed. The chasing girl heard a whistle from above.
She looked up and saw a boy’s freckled face move closer to the edge. He held his arms out over the parapet wall. In his hands he clutched a brick. He looked down into her eyes, which were also his eyes, the man in 2025 and the girl in 1925 and the boy on the roof top let go. The sound of the first running girl’s body smacking the ground echoed, followed by the chasing girl’s whisper, “oh god…oh god.” The cold in the rooftop boy’s smile made them shudder. The shiver and the smacking sound and the prayer echoed inside them.
Allie Elwyn enjoys writing flash fiction when needing a break from working on longer projects.
Modern Flash Fiction 