Concerning the Alley

The street was a gypsy highway long ago abandoned, and with it the traces, memorials and discard of those who had gone before. A wheel-less broken pram lay like a half-buried galleon amid the wreckage of discarded clothes, appliances, and what seemed a shipwreck of a century of travelers' waste. One of the major arcana floated by on a stream. A bright colored scarf drifted from a rusted, mottled water-pipe leaning out from moldered bricks, and as Tupelo approached a covey of young gutter punks scattered out into the open light, boots splashing through puddles of tipsy street. No doubt they had been spooked by the passage of the Ragamuffin King.
Edge lit by red train light he saw the ghost of an oil-cloth sail silhouette briefly across the lot, followed it through the amber lights of the yard. Lush vegetation, ivy, flower boxes and gardens become wild things dangled over the ledges, crawled along the bricks, sought life in puddles and spaces of city. Time was abandoned, recalcitrant, sneaked off into pockets here. Smells of spices, actinic urine, body smell.
The alley was bitterly dark, and Tupelo saw, glowing faintly in white chalk as he entered, Kitty Rollins' mark. Then it opened into a courtyard forgotten by the world around. Tupelo couldn't even hear cars, people, or signs of life other than a pigeon gliding overhead to the towering, derelict theater house.