Sort of this prompt from Poets & Writers.
Title: Byways
WC: 600
I noticed the first a year ago, maybe two. Who knows how many times I’d walked past it before then—two houses in from the corner, a concrete cube right up against a chain-link fence looking out into the alley. The face jutting out at the bottom is what caught my attention all of a sudden—hinges for eyes and a sloped metal profile ending in a vertical underbite. It jogged memory that day, who knows why, but I knew I’d seen hundreds of them. I’d walked by them, squatting out there next to gate after gate, who knows how many times. That day, I snapped a picture. I called on my Chicago people and had an answer in minutes. It’s an incinerator, one that, for some reason, hadn’t been hauled away with the rest long ago. I remembered my grandfather burning garbage, years after he should have been, behind the big yellow house on Campbell in the Gage Park neighborhood.
It’s not just the one. There are a handful, maybe a dozen. Who knows how many times I’ve walked by each one before I notice. Before it reveals itself to me. This week’s says:
Star Box
One
Piece
I swear I saw the first phone weeks ago. The dog has developed a thing for alleys, and if it’s still light out, I’ll usually indulge her for at least part of the walk. This one’s not paved. It’s a pain in the ass that gets more and more clogged with weeds with every rainfall, but she trots down one side of the wheel ruts and I stick to the other. The leash, stretched out taut between the two of us, mows down knee-high dandelions as we move along, more or less in step. I swear I saw the first phone on the green rise right down the middle, its screen cracked, and I wondered if that was a before or after thing. I wondered what wheels slowly crunching through the irregular gravel might have had to do with any of it.
I don’t know which of these is the first phone. I don’t know if it’s either one of them, but the sight of the two of them nestled up and out of the way, set with care on the wooden edge of some kind of raised bed made me think: Romeo and Juliet. It never gets old.
It looked like the future the way only things from the past ever do. The shiny chrome brackets caught the baking hot sun. The honeycomb of diamonds and the twin rows of vents made me want to run the backs of my nails over the metal. I snapped the pictures quickly, awkwardly. There was someone in the alley and I suppose I didn’t want him thinking I might start rooting through the mismatched pile of things. I was annoyed right away with the fact that I’d gotten it off-center and at an odd angle. With the sun beating down I couldn’t tell if I’d gotten anything like a clear picture of the old-fashioned dial. I did, as it turned out. Two shots, more than clear enough to see the word:
Titan
For just an instant the fantasy held. Titan—a name worthy of a 1950s spaceship, touching down at the end of its journey from the far edge of the solar system in the distant future of 1985. But the picture was too clear, really. With its plastic knob missing, the everydayness of the object was revealed. This Titan had arrived from nowhere more exotic than Sedalia, Missouri.
MTZQ Telecommuniculturates 