Ruin Road Excerpt #1

It was one of those days when the sky was so clear that you could see the moon, even in the middle of the morning.

She looked up at it, laying in the backyard of the house that she had always lived in.

215 East Rowan Road.

Ruin Road as she and all her friends called it.

It was the part of the town people stayed away from. It was the part of town where the parents worked three jobs between them, and still collected a check in the mail. It was the part of town where cars sat on cinderblocks in the front yard, but with nothing to imply that there was any work being done on them; they simply sat there, as detritus, rather like the kids who sat in them on long summer days, pretending to be astronauts, flying up to that bright day-moon.

It was the part of town with overgrown yards, and largely unused tire swings. With broken beer bottles shattered in the streets, cigarette butts which never seemed to be removed, flattened out by countless passing feet.

It was the part of town where the houses were too old to be nice, too new to be vintage, and too uncared for to carry any pride whatsoever by the parents who owned them, but just desperate enough to imbue the progeny of Ruin Road with a sense of belonging, attachment; a history they shared that no one else could know.

It was the Rust Belt’s rust belt, Ruin Road, and it was determined to look the part, a standard post-industrialist Appalachian coal town, the forests and mountains raped by the unhindered progress of the mighty god, The Economy. It had passed them over and scourged everything in its wake as it moved on to the next.

The grass scratched at her ears, but she didn’t mind, laying there in the yard, looking up at that ghostly, ethereal moon, that was in the right place at the wrong time.

Another day of waiting for Jamie Matthews.