FicWad: fresh-picked original and fan fiction

The model was plastered onto the forty foot warehouse building. Her face sun bleached for decades. It's mid afternoon, sunny blues and empty bottles of soda pop litter the vacant block. The model's once chaste lips now bleed graffiti. Under that rusted “suicide bridge” and below Jersey's richest, there sits the once prosperous lot. Its concrete grasslands and unknown stenches are enough to make anyone speed past. Walking is okay; it's quiet and strange enough that you might want to pause for a brief moment. Thoughtless walks were okay, anyhow. If you think too much, you get sucked into the want to know why. Why?

If you pause, observe the deserted building, take out those rotting beats droning through your ears, you might hear the desire. The vastly cracked windows that cast deformed shadows, mirroring your childhood fears. If you were to stop, sit down by the diamond shaped steel fence holding faded signs that you guiltily disobeyed, but still held on to that cancer stick in your hand. The smoke would rid itself, sending sickly odors to cling onto the nearest object. Shredded leaves will wash up in the wind and settle themselves near that peeling supermodel. You will think for a moment, breathing in the smoke, eyes fixed on the high voltage sign, the open door, that disgusting habit you got from your dysfunctional family. The smoke will drift again, the ash will tumble sadly from your stub of a cigarette. You'll be able to hear the ripped out headphones, their screechy and ludicrously loud tunes.

If ravens call, they'll perfectly fit your anxious mood, beads of cold water will fall from above. You look up, still cautiously moving towards the door ajar. More and more rush down, vaguely familiar smells will dangle around you. Only a few seconds pass before you're drenched in rain and the cigarette puffs its last breath. It's what we do, you'd think, sighing before dropping your empty everyday dose of cancer on the ground.

Deathly chirps ring to your poor ears, breaking you away from the moment and back to mechanical world. Light flashes false hope when you pull out your phone.

It'll be your dead friend.

Only it won't be, just a person with the same name. You'd decide to answer anyway, putting one headphone back in the vacant ear. You'll continue on your brisk walk, leaving the corporate grave and its scarred but lively stained supermodel to rot. The rain mixed with the voice of someone you barely know will carry you back up the wretched streets. Past “suicide bridge”, past the person you were a minute before. You'll laugh. That voice on the line will laugh. You 'd make plans to pass each other by, to say hello sometime far from the abandoned brick building, far from pieces of cardboard telling you what to do. Far from that shattered supermodel pasted on the wall.

If only you'd stop.

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