Main Street Magazine Spring '23

a functioning motorbike). The most interesting things are in the color covering
the concrete structures no one else is brave enough to stop under, to look at
for more than a few seconds.
“Oh, look at that one, Keys,” Maeve says, pointing to the overpass ahead of
them. Keys meows from his position on her shoulder.
The sun is just right that its light reaches under the overpass, making the
colors splashed onto it stand out even from far away. It’s at least another few
hundred feet before Maeve steps under the concrete, stopping to get a better
look. If any other messengers pass by, they’ll call her crazy, but she knows this
structure is stable — and besides, she’ll have a warning if it does decide to
come down.
She checks the ground first. Sometimes, she finds spray cans, who knows
how old, left there, half-buried in the dirt — but there’s nothing today. A little
disappointed, she looks up, steps back, and takes it in.
The colors are brighter than she’d expected. If she had to guess,
the sun doesn’t reach this wall that often, so it hasn’t had the time to
bleach it like the others she’s seen.
undeniably meant to be a feline, reaching its vibrant paws up over its head,
claws outstretched, tearing the gray concrete open into a night sky.
Without taking her eyes away, she reaches into her shoulder bag, rifling
through the letters and past the book until she finds her journal, bound
and decorated herself, pages warped from use, pen attached. It’s filled with
sketches–a closed fist, a constellation of sun-bleached flowers, a rose, a group
of people, so on and so forth, each from one of her message runs, each a copy
of the pieces no one else dares to stop and see for themselves.
She finds a blank page toward the back of the journal and gets to work on this
one, absorbing and taking down every detail she can.
The book she’s carrying today has pictures of other pieces of art, on canvas
or wood or some other material not meant to last unpreserved. No one has
found any of those intact, as far as she’s aware. They’re too fragile, and some
of them claim to be an uncrossable ocean away. The books are all they have
left of them.
Most of what she’s found wasn’t documented the same way, so she’s taken it
upon herself. These are the ones that last, and she wants to make sure that
even with the sun-bleaching, the weathering, the collapses, that they’ll keep
lasting in whatever way they can.
“Hey, it’s you,” she laughs, reaching up to scratch under Keys’s chin. He purrs
in response.
The colors are much brighter, unrealistic as far as Maeve is aware, but it’s
Photos by Se Choi
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