Well, I finished with my soul-searching and I made up my mind.

“And I do not care what you say,” I told my parents as an afterthought. “I’m moving to La Anarquia in one week.”

La Anarquia- Spanish for Anarchy- was the name of a small Ohio city. There was nothing particularly interesting about La Anarquia, besides it’s name, and it’s informal title- “The Ghetto of Northeast Ohio”- and it’s formal one- “The Birthplace of American Processed Cheez Food”. If cities were fantastical creatures, La Anarquia would be a troll- small, ugly, and singularly lacking in charm. But who needs charm? I had had charm forced at me for the better part of my life.

I’m from Sheltsenburg, Indiana, population 1,047. Cute, comfy, cow-infested.

My life there was going nowhere, and , unfortunately, I was aiding and abetting the downhill slog in every way possible. I had just graduated from college with a major in art history, but what can a person of average intelligence do with a major in art history? I didn’t know. I didn’t used to care.

This is why I made a move that at the time I was very proud of- sick of my own constant inability to provide answers to the simple question of “so what do you plan to do with your life?”, I made a snap decision and took matters into my own hands. I don’t usually do stupid things like that, but-

Oh, blame my inconsistent mental health. People have always been hinting that I have issues.

So: with a few two-hour drives and phone calls and nearly all of my graduation-present money spent, I built my road up to the inevitable point where I sat shivering in my car at seven on a July morning, coffee in cup holder, goodbyes said and keys in ignition.

“OK!” I said to myself, a little awkwardly, as I was a person I didn’t ordinarily speak to. “Let’s get going!”

I did.

I drove with my hands shivering a little, and saw the sun rise pollution pink over the thruway that morning. And I was alone. Every friend I could think of was too tied up in their own life to come with me and help me move in, and my parents, who had decided to indirectly teach me a lesson by allowing me to go to La Anarquia and struggle there for as long as I could stand, would not come to help me either. Not that I hadn’t asked for it, but since self-pity is such a soothing emotion, I spent most of the drive basking in the stuff.

(-------------------------)

I am an optimist, generally. But you have to have a lot more than a positive outlook on life to see the beauty in a place like Wolf Road.

Actually, you’d need drugs. Powerful, hallucinogenic drugs.

It was the sparest of spare- every single building was concrete on top of concrete, and the only color (besides gray) came from chipping paint, rust red and dirty blue, and dandelions the color of rotting bananas flopping through sidewalk cracks. Wolf Road itself was a crumbly, pothole infested dead end that looked like the end of the world. Under my car’s tires, patches of gravel rumbled and scraped, and even at a crawl, the noise was grating.

I had been here once before, in search of my new city home, but I think that in my eagerness and bright-eyed enthusiasm about finding my very own apartment and moving away, I’d failed to notice just what an ugly location it was.

Sorry news for me; for the next year, I would be living here, a prime example of living with one’s mistakes.

Fortunately/unfortunately, there seemed to be plenty of people with whom I could share the miseries of the Road. I had neighbors, make no mistake; a couple of kids on a front porch stared and glared at me as I drove past, and an old lady looked up from hanging her wet clothes up to dry stopped and regarded me blankly for about ten seconds.

I didn’t look at them. My throat started constricting, and my hands trembled on the steering wheel. I could not cry, though, not in front of all these seedy-looking ghetto people. They were probably waiting for signs of weakness. Yup. They’d rush the car, drag me out and violently rob me before I could say hello neighbors and that would absolutely ruin my day. Knowing this, and keeping silent and as cool as I knew how, I steered into the driveway of the apartment complex- a vast, bleak, chlorine-blue building surrounded by lousy-looking automobiles.

Wolf Street apartments, they were called. They couldn’t even work up the imagination to call it something dumb and pretentious, like Oak Tree Acres, or, Von Rothstein Manor Apartments. Something I could have laughed at. As it was, laughs were hard in coming.

The guy at the reception desk in the lobby was nice. I mean, I assume he was nice, because if he had been mean and nasty, I would have remembered it. As it is, I don’t recall a thing about him or about our exchange of words. I’m sure he went over everything, told me about rent and sets of keys and my malfunctioning shower, but I skipped it over in my head. Not that important.

I had come up to La Anarquia alone, so it was going to be a job unloading all my stuff form the car. As it was, I didn’t have the majority of the furniture I was going to want- and no dishes- and a single pillow and a few sheets for bedding. I had to go out and buy crap tomorrow, and with my own dwindling funds.

This was not like college.

In college, I’d had my parents there to help lug all my heavy things around.

Today they refused to come out and help. After all, if I thought I was responsible and adult enough to do this, against their good judgment, then I was obviously responsible and adult enough to do it without them to baby me and help me to my feet.

Life’s harsh, I suppose. But did harsh really have to involve a couple of tons of belongings, an eighty-degree June afternoon, three flights of echoey stairs and a three thousand pound door that positively loathed opening? After a mere fifteen minutes of climbing and lugging, I sat down on the hood of my car in tears. The mercilessly blazing sun blurred and went watery under my gaze.

I was going to suffer severe muscle fatigue doing this, and faint. That’s right; faint! Hah!

Try not feeling sorry for me then.

I had just decided that if I stared at the sun for long enough that might finish me off, when I heard the driveway gravel scuff under approaching footsteps very close to me.

I dragged my eyes back to the parking lot. A guy was walking toward me- well, not toward me purposefully, but in my direction. He was about my age, from what I could tell- tall and skinny and not particularly interesting looking, with dark brown eyes and brown hair and a gray Penn. State sweatshirt on.

I wiped my wet face off furiously, and squinted to make my teary eyes less obvious. I didn’t like to be seen crying.

I watched the guy pensively, out of the corner of my eye. I hoped he wouldn’t talk to me.

“Hey, there,” he said this incredibly casually, and at first I almost thought he’d said it to himself, except that he was looking at me when he said it. Crap on a stick.

“Hi!” I replied, in that higher-than-normal voice that we tend to speak in when being awkwardly polite.

“Do you need help?” he asked, stopping at a slight distance from me. “I saw you from my window. You look like you need help.”

“Oh…” it was always like this with me- I was always tempted to refuse the things I wanted when they were offered to me. However, now was not a time for bad habits. “Sure. Yeah. I mean, if you want to. I live a couple of floors up.”

“Good,” was all he replied to this. “And speaking of which, what’s your name? Looks like you’re the new girl in town, so I’d like to at least know your name-“

“It’s Maggie Young.”

“Nice! Nice to meetcha, Maggie. Of course, most people here won’t talk to me long enough to tell me something that basic, but that’s the kind of people we have here. I’m a little new to this place myself. I came here- what was it- about six months ago. It’s been a decent six months. But the point is, the people here are cranky. I think-”

He kept talking. And talking. I comfortably settled into listening to his pointless chattering as we, a hamper of clothes betwixt us, worked our way up my three flights of stairs. I was really happy I’d let him help me out. That kind of person- the kind that can go on and on like this guy- always made me happy, because they never expected me to contribute to the conversation.

“You didn’t tell me your name, did you?” I asked when I could fit a word in edgewise.

“No! No, I didn’t,” he said, as we set the hamper down heavily. “I forgot. I forget everything. Last week I forgot my mom’s birthday, and the folks were expecting me to come up to visit and all, oh man. Ugh. Yeah, I pretty much lost at life where was I?”

“Your name?”

“My name. I’m Harlan Ellison. Nice to meetcha.”

We shook hands.

It just so happens that Harlan Ellison is also the name of a prolific science-fiction writer and editor, but no way was I going to made my nerdiness that obvious by telling him.

“So,” said Harlan Ellison, kind of bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet and swinging his arms. “How do you like Wolf Road so far? Abomination, isn’t it? Heh heh heh. What a stupid word. Anyway-?”

“I agree with you,” I said, peering out the window. “But there’s a garage right next door,” I added. “That’s good.” Admittedly, though, the garage- the last building on the street- was more than a little abandoned-looking. The only vehicles near it were one heavily rusted car and a small truck bearing the black letters “Nevada, inc.” on the front. There were no people near it, and the windows were pitch, glassy black. No light in the place.

“Oh, that’s not open for business,” said Harlan quickly.

I looked at it again. It was quite creepy, that garage. Creepy in the manner of the old, abandoned factories you drive past sometimes in cities- full of rusted machinery and crumbling bricks and broken glass and bad potential. My body gave an involuntary twitch-shudder. I didn’t like ruins.

“Of course,” I said.

“Look, let’s get going, OK? I’m not a big fan of that place,” said Harlan, very slightly urgently.

Following him down the stairs, I frowned at the back of his head, unsettled. I’d only been on Wolf Road for an hour, and already it was making me uncomfortable. Between sinister and possibly weapon-toting inhabitants, a slightly creepy name (think about it: Wolf Road? Happier names have been thought of) and crumbly, wrecked-up garages with distinctly “bad vibes”, my new world was looking like a big, fat nightmare.

A.N) Yay! Now don’t you want to review? Yes! Yes you do! As always, constructive crticismcool, but flamespunishable by death. The end.