Chalk Man dispensed his magic through a stick of gypsum. His formulas on the walls of the colleges left scientists baffled. Some said his drawings on the grounds of the zoo became the elephants who gave rides to the children. Still others said it was his chalky residue that flew off Reggie Jackson’s bat one October night. Chalk Man wrote the story of the Bronx.
So, when Estefania discovered a troubling theme embedded in his words, she made it her business to hunt him down. Her odyssey began in the brief sliver of Autumnal sunlight before night but after school hours. She shook free all the lessons she was supposed to have learned from her public-school education and relied on her instincts to navigate the streets of her neighborhood, a cemetery of institutional corpses. The stationary store now sold liquor. The toy store cashed checks for a price. The police were scarce but Army soldiers manned a recruiting station in an empty storefront.
Misery grows like weeds from the dead, wrote the Chalk Man.
After a fruitless search, Estefania stopped home briefly to check on her wily grandmother, to feed her energetic siblings and to water the flowering plants on the fire escape out of her window. Across the courtyard she could see an abandoned tenement. Once it pulsed with life on every floor, but now all it offered was the blank stare of broken windows and a front door off its hinges like a lolling tongue.
I cry bricks.
Estefania resumed her search after dinner and picked up the Chalk Man’s trail on the corner. Weeks earlier, the hydrant offered relief from the unrelenting heat to giddy children like herself. A torrent of water exploded in an arc that grew little rainbows out of the asphalt. However, men in stained jumpsuits used heavy wrenches to strangle silent its roar. Now, it just drooled false promise of hope that would never be realized.
Water is the absentee mother of despair.
Estefania and the Chalk Man were on the same path. She found her quarry in the park where the attendants, driven by a thirst for vengeance, chased teenaged vandals who set bonfires ablaze in the wire trash bins stuffed with dried leaves. Most of the senior citizens fled to the safety offered by locked doors, but one wizened vagabond remained, stroking the thundercloud on his chin as he composed on one knee. Then, he dusted his hands off on the thighs of his faded bellbottoms.
“Your words are killing this neighborhood,” said Estefania.
“I simply write what I see,” said the Chalk Man, looking over her into the fires. “This neighborhood is dying, if it isn’t dead already. What I have written will stand as its eulogy.”
“No, there is still life here.”
“Chaos is what is left. That’s why I’m leaving.”
“You’re abandoning us, your neighbors, your home?”
“It’s your home now,” he said, shuffling towards shadows creeping over the horizon.
“And what have you left as my inheritance?” she called out to him. “You’re not even leaving me your chalk.”
“Is that what this is about?” he asked, stuffing his chalk deep into his pocket. “This is mine. Get your own.”
Estefania didn’t understand the shame she was made to feel for voicing her opinion or for asking for help. Right then and there, she decided she hated the Chalk Man, not for what he wrote, not even because he was leaving, but because he could do both with impunity. Then, once safely across the bridge, he could look back and blame the death of his neighborhood on those he abandoned.
The Chalk Man slipped into the shadows creeping over the horizon never to be seen by Estefania again. She retreated into the park where fallen leaves carpeted the concrete path. She swept them away under her foot and discovered the Chalk Man’s final epitaph.
Death comes in ….
She didn’t bother to finish reading it. Instead, she pressed her soul onto the pavement and wiped the words away with some dried leaves. Once, not long ago, the leaves were green. Since then, they had been yellow, orange, red and brown. It wasn’t death, just change. The tree would bloom again.
Estefania’s congregation joined her in the dancing lights of the fires. They spread out a flattened cardboard box rescued from a rancid dumpster and set up a boom box that provided a strong heartbeat that reverberated inside her chest. While, the dancers spun on the tops of their heads, Estefania shared verses that sprouted little rainbows all the way to the very limits of how far her voice carried. She filled the void of the neighborhood with an undeniable flow that no wrench could strangle silent.
James Kennedy learned that phenomenal stories hide in everyday life while writing hundreds of articles for Anton Community Newspapers. He has been trying hard to capture their beauty in short form ever since. His work has appeared at SmokeLong Quarterly and Writer’s Digest and has been included in The Best Small Fictions 2016. When he isn’t writing, he teaches at Nassau Community College and helps out at Grasshopper’s Comics while pursuing a PhD in Literacy Studies at Hofstra University.
–Background & Foreground Photography by Jon Damaschke