the ghost town of Bodie

The sky was overcast in purple and gray tones, with only the slightest fleck of blue in the far off distance. The man in the gas mask kept on driving the empty road, knowing that eventually he would come to his old town, not knowing if anyone would be there to welcome him home.

With each mile traveled, the anger started to slowly escape his tortured mind. Too much smoke and whiskey had trapped his malignant and poisonous words on a flicked and venomous tongue.

He was tired of lashing out on the feeble and retarded and just wanted to sit on an empty porch swing to watch the sun set as his life slipped away into a more comfortable medium.

Bodie. The town was frozen in decay, arrested in time, abandoned to botched souls. He felt right at home, for the first time in years. Perhaps the gas mask could finally be removed and the man could breathe.

His feet slowly crunch the gravelly stone beneath as he steps toward the church. He tries to sense a higher presence, a state of fact or existing, yet with each empty pew he finds only more of the same.

That is to say, he feels nothing. Angel’s bells softly play in the blowing wind, and he accepts his fate, and joins the ghosts that wander the town’s darker corner.