The echoes from a town's last breath
The last of the furnaces shut down on a Tuesday. Most of the stacks have been cold for years, but they kept the lights blinking on their crowns. City hall said it was for the low-flying cargo drones. I think they just didn’t want all the chimneys to disappear into the dark.
I was halfway across the viaduct. One last blink, just like the one before, then nothing. Only a smear of neon from the riverfront casino down the way. I felt it, that absence. Air in the night felt like someone stopped holding their breath.
Papers next day said the last bulbs burnt out, and budget cuts meant the contract for replacements expired. But something passed.
The town’s heart was the foundry floor. All hammering and heat and human endeavor. Its soul found form in the union hall. A soul born there in the Gilded Age. It found a presence and a voice in the din of men and women fighting together for fairness in pay, work, safety. A shared determination, they said over time it grew into something more real. So real they felt it walk with them back to the foundry floor, moving the lines, keeping them safe.
Industry shrank, the hall got quieter. Big votes among shouting crowds became small, rowdy meetings, then polite conversations in a corner over coffee. And when they stripped away the last union contracts, locked the foundry gates to those workers, someone used that hall and opened a bar.
It’s where old hands would come when they got off whatever work they could still get. Non-union, low wages, long hours. Desperate to keep the house, pay the rent, and feed the kids. Drinking cheap beer, shooting pool, they’d swap stories of the better years.
And even, that spirit might show itself. I remember leaning on the bar one time and feeling the floorboards tremble under my boots. Just a moment, like a train passing underground. Or what the foundry floor might have felt like at its peak.
I make deliveries now. Synths to the towers near the interstate. Custom-print parts mail-ordered to the few machinists who cling to the east side of the river. If I ride long enough I still sometimes feel the energy of these places. Living places. Not just network coverage, but streets where the sidewalk hums and there’s a whiff of oil and hot metal.
I can still feel, for a second, something working just out of sight.
That hum’s fading everywhere.
After the lights on the stacks died, I took a ride past the hall. A dead neon beer sign in the window. Plywood sheet over the door, spray-painted “CLOSED”. Handwriting too neat to be written in real anger. It’d been dwindling for years. That place had birthed the spirit, kept its echo alive. Now it’s empty.
Can a town die twice? It’s slow the first time around. Sold off over decades, losing itself piece by piece. But this second death was quick. One moment there was something there, still, hanging on, watching over us. And the next…nothing.
Now when I ride at night the streets are longer. The blocks are farther apart. No hum, no singing, no rumble. Just the sounds of my wheels on asphalt in the rain.
Even if I can’t name it, I mourn it. We know we lost something. We might even know what it was. Maybe we should say it aloud more often. Before it slips away entirely.