1667 Philadelphia Street

The machine was tearing it down. Reducing the old house to a pile of brick and boards. The damp November air smelled of mortar and dust. It reared up like some prehistoric beast before slamming down in a thunderous crash.

It had been alive once, built by a proud, newly wealthy family. Two generations of children ran through its halls; shouting, clamoring, playing. Then the elderly lived here, telling stories of their younger days.

A small crowd watched the machine do its work. No one remembered the good times. The house had been abandoned, unloved but not empty. It had been a crack house-- filled with a perverse life. Now it was a memory. Soon nothing would remain but the trees.

Thursday Morning

Lisa idly poked the damp clay with a stick. She always liked drawing in the mud after a spring rain. The clay was perfect- sticky but not too hard. Better yet, it was too wet to dig in the garden. She could draw in the mud all morning.

It had stormed last night; a terrible storm with thunder and lightning. The wind blew so hard that Lisa thought it would blow the roof off her house. She'd slept under her bed. The morning however, was beautiful with a clear blue sky. The spring morning air was chilly, but at least the sun was warm.

Lisa looked up from her little patch of clay and into the distance beyond the vegetable gardens and the copses of ash and cottonwood trees. A cluster of skyscrapers glinted dully in the morning sunlight. Their windows were empty, their halls hollow. They were streaked with rust and grime and broken open. Lisa didn't care, they had always looked like that; reassuringly familiar.

But what she really loved about those old buildings was not how they looked or that they never changed: it was how they sounded. When the wind blew, as it did now, the buildings sang.