prompt: "ruin" title: "A.C. Moore or Less" in misc. flash fiction

Some call it “ruins photography” or “ruin tourism” but the most vulgar term is also the most apt: “ruin porn”. Documenting crumbling infrastructures, in best case showcasing our abandoned but mostly just crass voyeuristic schadenfreude, cruel laughs at the places dying but not-quite past.

Collapsing derelict Detroit, perhaps. Smug superiority over the misfortunes of others, hoping it a ritual, preventing it from happening to their cities, their ways of life, to them. Reveling in failures barely-passed. Getting off on destruction instead of getting sick.

Kids break into twenty-years hurricane-evacuated theme parks to digitally scavenge grim-comic virality. People wade through Chernobyl’s wreckage, hoping to snap seventeen-headed wolves, discovering only desolate swingsets rotting back unto the earth and oh, how the bastards laugh.

My girlfriend in my twenties worked floral-designs for a crafts store in the big-box-stripped remains of my old teenage paradise, the Riverside Mall. The Waldenbooks and comics shop, multiplex and Camelot, places where I learned worlds outside the rust-belt, they’d been there once. It all went under, sure, everything does, all things do if you’re “blessed” life long enough to see there was never any Normal, there was never any Real, only what seemed Eternal when young and then Whatever’s Comes Next.

No golden ages ever, all things are flux, welding ill-defined epochs together.

Once, I wandered around that store’s breakroom and saw to my astonishment there was a chunk of Mall behind their supplies, intact from the moment they shuttered the enclosed portions. My childhood wasn’t even worth demolition, left to decay. Posters, still yellowing in the video game store’s windows. Decade’s worth of dust accumulated atop extant paper cups at the frozen-drinks kiosk. Easier to leave to the rats but God the place was ten thousand memories, not worth putting down like Old Yeller but not worth preserving either, left to fade away into silences and shame.

My girlfriend, she’d only moved here after college, didn’t know it for what it was, only what it’d become, it took her a while to understand why I’d fallen to my knees numb there in the big-box’s auxiliary storage. She put it together, dead mall as my portrait Dorian Gray, stopped cleaning and just held me. It was all she could do, I could do, all anyone could do.

It was just some chintzy shops from a decade ago but the fact that it was special when I was too young to know how things can come and go, it made it more. A graveyard for that way of life, a way of being I believed lasted forever. So Riverside, rest well you peaceable kingdom and screw you “ruin porn”, these are memory mausoleums, not mere fetish-dungeons for “urban explorers”.

Consider before you walk through the graveyards of other peoples’ lives for laughs that someone else will do the same to you, if they aren’t already. You aren’t seeing watching else’s ghost, you bear witness to your own phantoms as well, there in the rubble and the ruins out Riverside.