Work Text:
Stepping out of your car you look around in awe of nature's power. The remains of quite a few buildings can be seen, but there is only one building with all four walls still, the paint is almost nonexistent, and the doors are missing entirely. Its roof is gone, replaced with the leaves and branches of a large tree. There’s a haunted feeling in the air, a place that has lost its purpose, and there’s a smell of decay in the air.
You step through the doorway of the abandoned corner grocery store and the peaceful atmosphere is a stark contrast to the outside. The decaying smell should have been worse once you were inside, instead there’s the smell of growing things as the building is being reclaimed by nature. The place still has the bare bones of what it was before, the checkout counter is still intact, cash registers and all. The remains of the shelves have been pushed to the edges of the room as the tree grew. Peaking around the tree you can see the remains of the refrigerators, there’s no glass anymore, but there is moss growing over the edges and across the floor.
With a bit of careful maneuvering, you move to the other side of the tree. Here, in the middle of the decay and new growth, you close your eyes and listen. There's a sort of quiet that holds an echo of missing sound, what would have been before: people talking, boxes coming off of shelves, the hum of the refrigerators, the buzzing of fluorescent bulbs, the bell ringing above the door, and the ding of the registers. The absence of those sounds leaves a kind of pressure on the air that you can almost feel. You can imagine what it would look like bright lights, clean floors, perhaps a tired mom pushing a squeaky cart, a cashier ringing up crinkling items. You can almost smell the fresh bread, the plastic of the bottles on the shelves, and the sweat of the person stocking the shelves.
Taking a breath breaks the illusion, the smell of growing things out of place for what was once in this place. It reminds you though, to also consider what this place will become in the future as the decayed and old building is replaced by a new habitat. The old sounds have been replaced: there’s now the rustling of leaves, the creaking of branches, there are baby birds chirping in a nest, the buzzing of insects, and there’s even the scurrying of what sounds like a mouse in the undergrowth. Eventually, the walls will give way and this place will be part of the surrounding area. The wood of the counters will decompose and new growth will replace them. The registers and refrigerators will last the longest, giving way slowly to rust and breaking down. Many small creatures will likely live within them, they will make excellent homes to be safe from predators. In the future, the time that is nearer than when this place was new, there will be nothing left of the little corner store. One day someone will come across this tree and it will be just another part of the forest, nothing remarkable about it.
You take a few pictures, trying to capture the feeling of this place, but you know that images cannot capture the feeling that exists here. Careful still, you maneuver back out of the building, trying to disturb as little of it as possible. A few more pictures and you step back through the empty doorway and into the sun. The feeling of loneliness and decay returns; the lost little building will soon be gone. The click of the camera sounds louder out here somehow but you take them and then go back to your car. As you drive away, you are going back to your own clean and sound-filled space, you know that someday where you live will be nothing more than a building slowly being reclaimed by nature until no one remembers you were there.