FICTION SERIES
Georgie Was Here
Excerpts from Gehenna
Georgie—nearly fifty years old, and in direct violation of his home detention—gracefully scaled the rusted cyclone fence.
A gardener’s nightmare swallowed him to the knees as he dropped over. He waded through nettlesome weeds and mutant vegetation sharp as a prodigy’s abilities. “Doctor Livingstone, I presume,” he mused aloud as the field gave way to the playground blacktop.
He paused beside an abused NO TRESPASSING placard, his shadow impossibly long in the sun’s fleeting radiance. Tetherball poles leaned drunkenly, torn chains trailing from some, bleached police tape from others.
Georgie passed over a painted hopscotch pattern, broken glass crunching beneath his boots. As he reached the schoolhouse, he gingerly produced a joint. Running it through his puckered lips, he lit its end. He sat cross-legged on the asphalt.
This place—Lincoln-Woolfe Elementary School—had been his quiet spot since finishing his first bullet in Mongoose Creek Corrections twelve years ago. Yet now it seemed foreign, sinister, and impenetrable. Dusk bathed the environment in crimson. The school’s outer walls reflected sundown, overlapping graffiti and crumbling grout awash in a multi-toned aurora.
He read the spray-painted stories written on the building’s skin. GASOLINE ALLEY BOYS. SOUTH TOWN SYNDICATE. MILKWOLF IS NOT A FRIEND. FUCK BOHEKA COUNTY.
Georgie frowned. Time had been cruel, and he had been oblivious. This was no longer the institution he and his two younger brothers had concurrently attended; no sunny noon hour could have ever been filled here.
Sodium lamps flickered weakly, so close to death that even the moths ignored them. Repeated arson had destroyed whole sections of the gymnasium. Half-walls stood scorched, twisted rebar askew like the writhing snakes on Medusa’s scalp.
No window’s glass had been spared from defacement. Security bars and chicken wire filled in splintered, deteriorating frames. Misshapen coils of razor wire ran the roof’s perimeter, doubled twice over itself.
Shrill sirens from afar broke Georgie’s trance. He stood abruptly, aware that night had craftily overtaken the earth. Warm breezes sent debris across the schoolyard like rodents fleeing a sinking vessel.
Everything had changed with the subtle finesse of an illusionist’s sleight-of-hand.
Georgie suddenly felt very small, a marble among boulders.
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