Art Alive (1): Destiny City tries to keep a clean, upstanding city, but sometimes you just can’t beat the taggers. Graffiti art has been popping up around the city but it seems like it’s always moving from place to the next. Literally. The art is up one day and gone the next--on a completely different wall. Some people think it’s an elaborate prank--except, sometimes, in the dark of the night, you can see the art stretching from one wall to the next. Or, maybe it’s just your eyes playing tricks on you. No one would believe you if you said you saw artwork moving, anyway.
Destiny City, 11:57 PM.
It wasn’t normal for Harvey to be walking the streets at such an hour, but with work came work responsibilities that occasionally necessitated long nights that resulted in often missing the last bus to get him home. And where was his car? Well. Considering it was a junker he made sure to park it well out of the way of anyone who had a vehicle that they used on a regular basis because it actually worked. He’d considered buying a new one in recent months, however various other expenses often took precedence, and if nothing else he was a man who had a good understanding of his priorities and readily sacrificed his personal convenience in order to keep to those priorities.
He really would be needing a new car soon, though.
Harvey walked on, his mind half on work while the other half was concerned about the neighborhood he was currently in. His client was the artsy sort and enjoyed living in a neighborhood that was plastered with it. It was doubtful that the art in question did anything for the market value on real estate in the area, but a cursory glance around when he first arrived earlier that afternoon told him that the art, or at least some of it, was actually pretty nice. Being an artist himself, granted using a very different medium, he could appreciate most of the pieces that he passed by on his way to his client.
At night, however, it all seemed to turn the streets of the neighborhood...gloomy was perhaps the best word he could think of? Instead of feeling drawn in he instead was burdened with this sense of foreboding and felt as though within the pieces lurked something more. Maybe it was the eerie fog that had settled that night, maybe it was because Halloween was right around the corner and there were homes and storefronts already starting to or were fully decorated and ready for the holiday to come, or maybe it was because it was weirdly quiet and the streets were devoid of a life apart from him. Whatever it was, the longer he walked the more unsettled he got about how much longer he had to walk.
His footsteps seemed so much louder now that he noticed that he was perfectly alone in a perfectly strange neighborhood on the night of a new moon. Rather than the tired and leisurely pace he had been going at just a few moments earlier, Harvey was now briskly walking down the street, hands stuffed in his pockets and his bag adjusted so that it was now settled more securely in front of him. His shoulders had stiffened significantly, and he walked in such a way that… made him look like an absolute target. Not that he could help it, having managed to stir himself into such a state.
Eyes felt as though they followed him, landscapes felt as though there was something within that was listening to his every step, and the words graffitied on the walls took on a different, somehow more menacing, tone.
But more than the vibe he got of the neighborhood now basked in darkness, more than the weird sense he got about the pieces of graffiti all over the walls of just about every building, he could swear that the pieces had... rearranged themselves somehow.
He glanced to his left and saw the painting of a sunrise over a wide open field. It spanned across a block’s length of brick wall, but he had this nagging feeling that he’d first seen it on a single home’s whitewashed brick wall two blocks up from where it currently was now. To his right, a painting of a cityscape that he thought he saw on a portion of a tall building on the opposite side of the street. Just up ahead, a stylized “Destiny City” that he could swear belonged somewhere else but he couldn’t quite place where.
He kept his eyes on that text, trying to place it, when he could swear he saw the “Y” stretch a little bit to its right and he froze. Harvey narrowed his eyes into their normal squinting state as he questioned his sanity for a minute.
But no, the “Y” stretched until it was double its original length when the “T” started to follow suit. Harvey could feel the goosebumps starting as he watched this process repeat until the words “Destiny City” stretched its way across its current wall, gliding over a painting of a cat, becoming obscured as it passed a fence that had a small pots of various plants hanging on it like some kind of sidewalk garden, continuing all along the wall before ultimately disappearing around the corner.
He blinked a few times at the now blank space where the words had previously been and he felt the sudden urge to scream his face off and run in the completely opposite direction. As a grown man he was, however, able to fight down the urge by literally biting the tip of his own tongue. The pain brought him back to his reality, where graffiti didn’t just move of its own free will and paintings and murals didn’t just rearrange themselves willy-nilly.
Just as this thought crossed his mind, however, a painting of a quiet lake had settled itself into the vacant space left behind by the “Destiny City” text. It looked horribly misplaced, with various stylized texts to its left clashing with the serenity of it, and the cat on the opposite side, with its stoic face and paw set in such a way that it was clearly the reason for the falling cup, also not quite contributing to its peaceful atmosphere.
The man blinked again, unbelieving despite clearly seeing what had just happened.
“I really need to get more sleep,” he whispered to himself, a feeble attempt at trying to explain it all away. It only half-worked. He turned a few blocks early from where he would normally turn and whipped his phone out. After a quick search on his phone he found the closest open café and basically made a run for it. His next search, a cab company.
His next search, a new car.
1046 (gdocs)
