The Super Glue On The Front

New York city, as the boys arrived they could see all the people that filled the streets, young women with bobbed hair, dressed in short skirts, drinking, smoking and saying what might be termed as “unladylike” things. Many lights and advertisements. They could also hear these beautiful sounds coming from speakeasies.

Taking another deep breath to help calm his nerves, John folded the letter and sealed it with some sticky tape. With his hands trembling he handed over his most private thoughts to Josie. After they had exchanged letters they said their goodbyes and went their separate ways. Once John got outside he looked up to the hazy sky and let out a shaky laugh full of relief. Maybe just maybe Josie would be the one to save him before it was too late. He hoped that she would open the letter before graduation and help him put back together the shattered pieces of his life. Because deep down that broken boy wanted to live more than anything in the

The door swung open with the amount of vigorous forced used by Babe Ruth to hit a homerun. The sound of the dilapidated, white wood smashing into the wall created goosebumps along my spine, as if a small spider was crawling up my back. Broken glass scattered the floor. The torn, black sheets on my bed laid the floor from the previous childlike tantrum. A single candle, with its flame still alive, remained from the outrageous outbreak.

Where the colorless tiles ended, a dark carpeting started. He looked further right, to the wall beyond the flooring, seeing the silhouettes of several stacks of boxes and metal racks used to hold clothing. From there, he looked ahead the thirty-foot space to the far wall, the view showing him empty floor space from where he stood, its emptiness ending at the building’s right wall.

Iris looked at me with confusion as I held the doorknob of a shabby building, daring myself to twist it. The front wall stood out suspiciously against the almost clinical utopia that surrounded it for miles and miles - you look to the right, there were rolling green hills that in the past would have been called fake, and on the left, a glistening blue sea and tall as can be skyscrapers. Ten years ago, where we just were a few minutes ago, you'd never see any of this - it was a sleepy city with not much going for it, but it's all hustle and bustle now.

"Samantha really can't find out. She'll be so smug that I messed up on the second week." I groaned, hugging my knees, "I have my keys though, so at least she can't give me that "this is why you don't keep your keys in your ignition" speech."

As the crowd aimlessly wandered and dispersed into the streets Aydon stood frozen why am I here, and where did I come from? He looked down at the glossy ticket in his hand- 1892 Sycamore Rd. apt 2. Aydon began walking down the street glancing at road sign looking for his. The people on the streets all walked with their heads up looking straight forward all on some mission to be the best. Only a few swayed and stumble lost, these few all wore the same grey pants and “Welcome To Freehold” shirts as Aydon marking them as new to the city not one looked younger than 16. Finally he managed to stumble upon Sycamore rd, his apartment was a carbon copy of all the other apartments on this street. He found his room and stumbled in, on a small table sat a welcome basket. It had some basic necessities like food, soap, and few sets of the same clothes. The basket also contained a letter that

Something fell near her, crashed down from the ceiling and showered sparks and embers onto her shirt and arms. It burned, it burned so much, but she couldn't move.

The building had been abandoned for a long time. It was four storeys and overlooked a deadly set of stairs that ran alongside a cliff. It was a rich building: rich in culture, rich in beauty, but richest of all in its history.

Jade storms into the study with smoke coming out of her ears. She storms up to her father desk and plants her hands on her hips. Mr. Pinole looks frightened. It had cost much to renovate her room and had to do it more than once and by the look in his precious daughter’s eyes, he was soon to have his study on the list for renovations. It didn’t take long for him to know putting his study back together would take several weeks.

They returned to the shed. Except this time, they went into the house that accompanied it. The two entered the basement of the house and went into a room deep in the ground. The house looked like any other kind of house from the outside. In fact, the only thing that made it different from the other houses on the block was the thing in the basement only they knew about.

“Emily all you care about is showing me, Brad your boyfriend, to your friends. And you proved it tonight too. You were even planning how to walk in and how I should look at you.”

His jaw dropped. There were old houses, ones that looked almost exactly like the ones he had seen in his social studies textbook. The intricately designed, curved black roofs, the cubical design- it was like it was the 1930’s.

Identical, square brick apartments dominated the landscape, adding to the bleakness; the dull uniformness being a staple of the city. In the ways the city was sprinkled with character, it was with the jagged, hieroglyphic graffiti that sloppily degraded whatever it touched, or the trash and dog shit that littered the streets, or the unintended touch of nature in the form of weeds exploiting weak spots in deteriorating infrastructure. Was there crime and violence? Of course. Was it sometimes a scary place to be in? Between the criminals and the police, there was almost no escape. Was there very little to do? Yes, and that’s part of the problem. But it was home. Either out of necessity, or a misguided sense of nostalgia, I look back at my childhood

there was nothing but a bunch of burnt things all around him buildings, trees, houses