The Ghost City
The city opens like a mouth: high‑rises in black glass, brick mills refit and abandoned again, MARTA tunnels breathing out cold air. Concrete cures forever here. Block after block keeps going, street names repeating, lights in windows stuck on a dim office setting no one remembers setting.
You hear people before you see them—snatches of sidewalk talk, bass rolling from a car that never turns the corner, a preacher on a crate. Figures move in your periphery: kids on decks, suits on phones, club lines that stretch and blur. When you look straight at anyone, the sidewalk empties. Only the echo stays.
next up… ashby… lenox… five points… the announcement runs together like rain down tinted glass. A train roars underfoot—only light and wind.
Stoops and small porches wedge themselves between towers—row houses stubborn as kudzu. A few porch lights burn sodium‑white, not warm, not welcoming—just on. Some say they mark safe doors. Others say they’re lures. If you step up and sit, the city edits you in.
Billboards glitch between ads you half‑remember and ones for places that never were. Roads taper to frames; a porch with no house leans over an alley. Whole blocks reset: graffiti gone, then back, then different.
They call it Devolve because the closer you get, the less finished anything looks: scaffolds to nowhere, stairwells ending at sky, neighborhoods inside office floors. And yet—every night is Saturday. Every light insists the city is still out.