Crack People

One hears about someone falling through the crack and never thinks that it could happen to him or her. After being rolled over, flatten, and beaten into a flexible papery thin person sliding between the lines of the sidewalk, it’s more like falling down into an unknown world, unobserved while in full sight of everyone around oneself.

With an eye pressed close to the slit joining both worlds one watches to see if others stepping on and falling through the cracks. Unseen people disappearing every second only to land in this other world and looking back into the one they left, longing both to return and to stay.
Sometimes people stop and look at the crack one might be peering out of, They feel that something lurks within a spidery break in a wall or the decaying sidewalk. After a brief shiver, they hurry on their way never knowing for sure if the feeling was true. Day after day, they stop and stare trying to decide if it is just a trick of the mind or if it is something else.
The wind harshly blows over uneven edges of the broken lines offering them a voice which to sing with. Whistles and squeaks sound like a true voice draw attention to the fissure in the low-lying wall. Some will stop and look, others will pick up their pace and scurry by giving a frightened glance. Afraid that something might truly is living in there waiting to ensnare living flesh.
Occasionally a person steps from the crack back into this world and yet remains unseen, Invisible to the human eye but not to the physical make up of the body. Involuntary shivers, trails of goose bumps, the feathery touch of nothingness.
Once few years a worker comes and surveys the lines that cross a pathway. He often returns with a bucket of concrete and a trowel, laying a layer of the creamy gray mush in the furrow and forever sealing one inside and preventing one from stumbling into the crevice.
It is only a patch to satisfy those that demand an effort to close all the holes in hopes of saving one from the fate of so many before. After a year or two, the weather has picked at the edges of the scab peeling it back to leave the wound open and raw once more.
Every hundred years a crew comes and disassembles a small part near the crease. Rebuilding the foundation and firmly melds the edges together so that no beam of light can enter the minuscule fissure left behind. They are unaware of the crumbling crust behind them, gaping its hungry mouth to swallow thousands into the depths of the unseen.


edited 3-02-2014