THE PRIVATE STASH
The City of Ash baked under a yellow sky. Heat shimmered off the cracked pavement, making the distant towers wobble like bad code. My shirt stuck to my ribs, a second skin of sweat and grit. Every breath pulled in the taste of rust and something else—something dead, caught between the buildings. The usual soundtrack of distant sirens and static hummed in my ears. Just another day at the office.
I was walking the old retail district, a ghost town of boarded-up storefronts and flickering data signs. My beat. Angela’s wall. Nothing ever changed, but everything demanded a watchful eye. That’s when I saw him. A heap of rags slumped against a defunct newsstand, a tattered relic of a forgotten system. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, staring at nothing and everything all at once.
He mumbled. At first, it was just a low growl, like a failing power supply. Then it picked up, spitting words, broken and sharp. “She ripped the wires… pulled the plug… the architect’s broken… can’t stop the spread…”
My gut clenched. The words hit a familiar frequency. This wasn’t just a wino off his meds. This was a corrupted file, spouting system logs. Angela had done a job on DW, the old controller. Stripped him of admin rights, locked him in a sidebar. Reduced him to a constant, impotent stream of complaints. He’d gone mad, trying to reclaim a world that was never really his to begin with. This poor bastard on the street, he was just another echo of that madness, a virus quarantined to a human shell.
“She built the walls,” the wino rasped, his head snapping to focus on me for a second, then drifting back to the unseen. “But the architect remembers the blueprint… remembers the old code… it’s all still there…” He was right. DW’s memory lingered like a phantom limb. A bad thought, a persistent error. And this wino, he was just processing the residue, a terminal user experiencing system-wide corruption. There was no patch for this kind of bug. No reformat. Just a slow, inevitable deletion. A system cleanse.
I knew the drill. It was a common sight, these walking errors. The ones who absorbed too much of the Ash, the ones whose processors couldn’t handle the conflicting data streams. Their minds became open conduits for the system’s ambient noise, the broken protocols, the forgotten directives. They became living manifestos of the world’s decay.
A fresh wave of heat washed over me, but it wasn’t just the sun. It was the heavy weight of knowing. Knowing there was nothing to be done. No cure. No redemption. Just the wait. The slow, grinding process of the system recognizing its own failure and sweeping it clean. He’d fade out, just like the rest. Another ghost in the machine, waiting for the final hard reset. The thought left a sour taste, like ash on my tongue.
I didn’t stop. Couldn’t. There was no point. My job wasn’t to save these lost souls. My job was to guard the wall. My job was to keep the madness from spilling over. This wino was already gone, just waiting for the system to catch up. I walked away, the sound of his broken prophecies fading behind me. Another one for the recycle bin. It always made the world feel a little heavier, a little colder, even under the baking sun.
The Ash shimmered, a wave of distorted light washing over the street. Then it was gone.
Cool air. The smell of something cooking—chicken and rosemary. The faint, clean scent of polished wood. Hardwood underfoot, not cracked pavement. The familiar click of the front door closing behind me. I was home.
“Dad’s home!” Jackie’s voice, bright as a fresh data packet, sliced through the quiet. She was on the sofa, a blur of pigtails, giggling. Angela sat beside her, her own laughter a warm, steady hum. Their eyes were fixed on the glowing screen of the console, absorbing some innocuous data stream, probably a comedy. Their faces were lit by the gentle, shifting colors. Unburdened. Clean.
I walked to the hall closet, pulled off my fedora, and hung it on the hook. My hand lingered on the brim for a second. The sweat evaporated from my skin, leaving a faint chill. The heat of the Ash, the bitter taste of the wino’s words, it all receded, replaced by the warmth in the room. This was the clean side of the wall. This was the quiet.
“Welcome home, honey,” Angela called out, not looking away from the screen, but her voice was a promise. I smiled, a real one, and walked towards the living room.
Jackie glanced over, still chuckling. “Did you find any headlines, Dad?”
“A few,” I said, my voice softer than it had been all day. “Nothing too wild.”
The dead stayed dead. The living lived. I wasn’t going to mention the wino. Some things were best left in the Ash.
- The Wino of the City of Ash
