Wayne Weekly “Silhouette Innocence”
Written by Wayne Taylor on October 15, 2018
This past Sunday I was driving home on my usual city block route through neighborhoods. Houses siting nearly on the sidewalks that ran in front of them. Residential property on shallow front lawns with aging homes almost shoulder to shoulder, almost touching in some instances.
As I pulled up to a stop sign on a three way intersection, I was facing the side yard of a two family home. I know the yard has only been vacant for a few years. I remember the house that stood there. I think it burned down. Today it was the backdrop for a Halloween cemetery created out of store bought cardboard figurines, gravestones, and buildings, flooded by purple lights. It was a party scene with skeletons celebrating who knows what. Maybe death, maybe the Halloween season.
Many of the bony frames held up mugs full of paintbrush beer reminiscent of Hollywood pirates celebrating the finding of a treasure chest full of gold Spanish doubloons. Their chiseled faces were smiling. Some were positioned as if dancing and carrying on around headstones leaning in different directions, the stones once straight and stable as they stood over the graveyard’s landscape in days gone by.
As I looked ahead, a saw a little girl, maybe six years old. Her pintsized jacket waving in the brisk breeze. She looked up at me as I sat at the stop sign, checking, to be sure, that all was clear, as she made her way across the street.
The little ones silhouette of childlike innocence against a background of death and hopelessness, and the deception of party-party amongst the lost souls.
The picture only lasted a few seconds, I accelerated as I made a sharp left onto the intersecting street.
Their feet run to evil, And they hasten to shed innocent blood; Their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity, Devastation and destruction are in their highways.
