The Sidewalk
By John Racette
Little Jimmy was careful not to step on a crack as he stepped from the crosswalk onto the second to last block before the edge of Plymouth. He was excellent at it—he would say awesome—and could easily look around at his surroundings even while walking at a fast pace. The street was lined with cars, here. The buildings all looked the same, made of brown panels. They were only one story, but they were taller than his school house. Each had a door and a large window, usually with the name of a business stenciled on it. Jimmy thought they might be office buildings, although he didn’t really know what people did in an office, just that they dressed in suits.
“Step on a crack, break your momma’s back!” he sang aloud.
He looked up the street, to the next traffic light and crosswalk. They were both red. Red light for the cars. Red hand for the pedestrians. That meant the cars were whizzing by. Don’t go on red, or you’ll be dead. Beyond the intersection, the sidewalk continued, and Jimmy could see the upper edge of the X’s. He glanced down and adjusted his gait to miss a seam in the concrete.
“It’ll never happen,” he said. “I’m that good.”
Jimmy approached the last intersection, the corner of Main and Omega, and considered the choice he was about to make. He could, at this point in his Thursday afternoon adventure, before his mom would get back from work, turn left and cross Main, and take the long “in-side” of Omega along the curve to the next light, which was at Second Street. From there, he’d take a left on Second and all the way back to Plymouth Community Complex, and home. If he turned right from here, he’d go ’round the block without crossing, and end up getting to Riverside and just having to turn right, because he wasn’t allowed to cross the dam. Then it was another straight shot back to home. He didn’t like that choice. It was boring, and Mom wouldn’t be home for hours.
If you’re gonna go all the way to the crosswalk, you’re gonna push the button.
Across Omega the buildings were behemoth. Giant warehouses of dark metal or stone. The stretch of Main that ran between them was narrower here, and shadowed by the warehouses. Long trucks could only turn around at the end. The X’s were obscured by the tall tankers and delivery trucks that lined the darkened road. The X’s were the thing. I’m gonna cross, he thought. He pressed the bright chrome button and watched the cars whiz past as if they didn’t ever have to stop.
“I press the button, and I own you.” Jimmy announced. After not long he heard the tone, three high-pitched beeps that told the pedestrians that it was their turn to cross. He paused; his father told him not to trust the beeps, but to trust his own eyes. Sometimes the cars on Omega were in too great a hurry to stop for the crosswalk people. You never stepped out unless the cars have actually stopped, even if it’s your turn. Jimmy wondered if the same rule applied to the cars, if a pedestrian was in too much of a hurry. He thought it would be easy to try to find out. Just time it so that the red hand was about to come back, and run out there. Would the cars wait? I mean, they had to. Didn’t they?
The cars had stopped, and Jimmy stepped onto the street and scurried across quickly. He looked back. The lines of cars was already long, and they sounded angry. Omega cars didn’t like being stopped. When the red hand appeared, their electric engines sounded like a swarm of bees and they buzzed away around the curve and out of sight.
He spun on his heel and a darkened sidewalk lay before him. He walked out of the sunlights and felt the coolness of the air at this far end of Main Street. He wondered if darkness was always this cool. The concrete looked darker, the cracks were harder to see. He waited a few seconds for his eyes to adjust, and wondered how they did. He wondered if he could see in pitch black if he waited long enough, if all of the city’s lights went to full out all at the same time, if the suns “went down,” he once heard someone say. And what would happen if they did. Nobody tried to talk about that when there were kids around. The dark was nothing for a boy to be concerned with…
“Step on a crack, break your momma’s back,” he whispered. There were warehouses on both sides of Main at this point. Four on each side. Each one had a giant door in the middle of the front, large enough for any truck to disappear into. They were all closed. There were smaller doors on both sides of the giant doors, and Jimmy thought they shouldn’t be necessary when you had a giant door. But that must have been the way the buildings came, because all of them had them. He crack-hopped past the first building, across a narrow, sunlit alley that curved off to the right between it and the next. He wondered how long the warehouses were. Did they run all the way to Riverside Dam? And what was in them?
At the second alley he peered up the street but couldn’t see the X’s. That’s okay, he thought. He knew they were there. He’d seen them there before, glimpsed them, once, when his father took him around the city, on Omega. It had been almost dark, and they had stopped at the light at Main. He had been looking out his window between the warehouses and saw the X’s. He swore to himself that he’d investigate. So, after lessons, today, when his mother worked the extra hours so she could leave early on Friday, he had hit Main Street at a run, and traversed the thirteen blocks from Schooling Center to the edge of town.
A giant truck rumbled behind him and made him jump and spin. When he’d realized that it was on the street—he was in no danger—he watched it drive past, its left blinker flashing on and off ponderously. Up and across the street, the giant gray door of the fourth warehouse began to open. Jimmy made an instant decision. Run! He could avoid the cracks at any speed, as if he were physically incapable of landing on them, The door was half way up by the time he reached the third alley. The truck was swinging wide to the right, as wide as it could in the narrow roadway, in order to make the turn into the warehouse. It obscured Jimmy’s view of the inside. He turned on the speed and arrived directly across the street from the giant door just as it had opened fully. Jimmy watched the giant truck make the turn. He thought there was no way such a big, long truck could make that turn! But it did, and the door, it seemed, was easily large enough for it to drive through. On either side of the truck as it entered, Jimmy could see light inside the building. And were there people in there, moving about? He thought that’s what he must have seen. The warehouse swallowed the truck, and the giant door began to close. Yes, there were people inside there, and there were lights on. And why shouldn’t there be, Jimmy thought. No mystery there. He hoped the truck turned its blinker off, and he looked down for cracks in the sidewalk and continued on.
At the far end of the fourth warehouse Jimmy emerged into the warm sunlight again. He squinted. There were no more buildings. Before him was a vast span of black tar mac, devoid of trucks, hemmed in by an unbroken loop of sidewalk that, if Jimmy took it, would bring him to the other side of Main Street, and back home. The sidewalk’s curb was bright yellow in the sunlight. Jimmy didn’t know why they painted it that color, since no one ever walked out here to see it.
But the sidewalk’s end wasn’t the attraction. The sidewalk was just a road for pedestrians. Most people never made it to the end of one, they just got on where they were starting from, and off where they wanted to be. No, it was what was beyond the end of the road, past the tar mac and the concrete, out where the sidewalk ends.
The X’s were only visible from a few parts of the city. Jimmy didn’t know how many of the streets made it all the way to them. He didn’t even know how many streets there were in the city! But Main Street, he knew, he had seen. Now, finally, they stood before him, nearly as tall as the warehouses, taller than the tankers and the big box trucks, the titanic X’s, all black and steel. And beyond the X’s…
“Wow.” Jimmy whispered. It was all he could say. His mind had never been prepared for the scene that lay before him. The X’s stood before him, an unbroken line of black sentinels that hummed faintly. Emanating from them was a blue light that illuminated a clearing of gray earth. Jimmy surveyed the expanse, here peering beneath one of the X’s, there through the diamond window where two X’s bumped together. Above the X’s was the washed out black sky that was always illuminated by the Plymouth’s array of white suns. Strewn across the dirt rested the dry bleached bones of monsters, some close, some farther away, all with their teeth bared at the impenetrable barrier. They were the darkness things about which the adults would talk in low tones. They were the horrible things that were living here, on this dark, sunless world, when Plymouth made planet-fall. They had seen humanity’s light, and rushed in to claw us, and kill us, and eat us. But the had all died—all of them—when they entered the light.
Jimmy stood at the apex of the curved sidewalk at the end of Main, and smiled.
“They didn’t stand a chance,” he said aloud.
He glanced at his feet, skipped over the crack between two slabs of concrete, and rounded the loop back home.