Episode Two: Street

The road is almost perfectly straight, lined with cars, flanked by sidewalk, by low bushes, trees, mail-slots in blonde-brick walls, and balconies - proudly displaying their damp clothes on drying racks.

Still suburbia. Still existent.

[Look]

You are on the footpath. No matter how many years you live here, how many times you walk the path - every day you exclaim to yourself: "I have never noticed that x before".

To the north lies your apartment block.

To the south, the street continues.

[South]

This street is a wonder of ideological symmetry, you can say that with certainty.

You remember, in art class at school - you would create brown paint by mixing every other color together.

Inelegant? Yes.

This street-scene, it reminds you of that little anecdote.

[Look]

The street is grey, the sky is blue, the clouds are white, the trees are dusty, the cars likewise.

A long-silent construction area has been fenced-off to the right. At some stage somebody has decided to construct an apartment block, and... pre-completion, the project had just petered out.

You imagine they're at home, constructing toy railways or... playing with slotcars.

Their wife walks in... "Honey, are you ever going to finish that apartment?"

A silence. He stares into space.

"Oh. I don't know. Maybe".

Back to the slot cars.

To the north, the street approaches your apartment.
To the south, there is a small cluster of stores.

[Look at building site]

Building sites are universally dark places. Windows had been fitted, now all but shattered by bored adolescents.

A pile of loose stones and chunks of brick rests against a makeshift wall of timber.

[Look at pile]

The stones are roughly the size of golf-balls. But dense.

You wonder if they were a side-effect of the construction effort, or a side effect of the desire to smash the windows. Somebody seems to have stockpiled them either way. This is definitely a manufactured effort.

[Take brick]

You take a chunk of brick from the pile.

[Look at brick]

A quarter house-brick, in a burnt-orange color.

[South]