The Witnesses

We cut school and rode over to the town everyone said was abandoned.

The road into town was fenced off, so we ditched our bikes in the tall grass and ducked beneath a corner someone had pulled loose.

Up ahead, the asphalt had buckled, long cracks forming a new, drunken path through the center of town. We followed, feeling the hum and heat of the earth rise through our sneakers like a sulfurous fever.

The houses sat in silence, as if they expected the families home from work any moment, porch swings swaying in a breeze we couldn’t feel.

We stopped in front of a storefront where the display window was covered in a fine, grey silt. Behind the glass, four mannequin heads sat on a shelf. They were bald and moon-pale, features smoothed by years of heat and neglect, but their eyes remained.

We stood in a line to match them, four against four, our reflections ghosting over their hollow plastic faces.

They were the witnesses who’d stayed behind, their sightless eyes fixed on the horizon where the smoke never fully cleared. We didn’t know if they were waiting for the families of this town to return or just watching for another soft thing to burn.