Unburying Hope Read Free

without
having to put on a heavy white denim jumpsuit, without strapping on safety
goggles, without having to stand at a conveyor belt for four straight hours
until you earned a twenty minute break, then another hour, then a forty minute
lunch break, then three hours and ten minutes until your eight hours on your
feet was over.
    House values in these former bustling areas had
plummeted so low that deserted homes could be bought for $5000, $10,000, but
there was always the odd house in the neighborhood where tree branches grew
into windows and an almost feral energy came forth from ivy vines and creeping
mint or toughened wisteria trunks that once had been small accents in a yard.  
    Families were locked out by the Sheriff when
banks didn’t get their monthly checks, the townships were broke and Celeste
avoided many areas as the City of Detroit chose to implode some of its 100,000
empty buildings and rip down streets that couldn’t seem to right themselves.
    Then there was another, far wealthier half-circle,
where the executives of the car companies and their manufacturing suppliers had
lived in luxury before their own lives were ripped asunder by the cannibalistic
greed of investment bankers who had bought their companies, off-shored jobs,
cashed out and then left them to writhe in a death spiral as international car
companies became competitive.
    Detroit’s Wall Street attackers enjoyed their
$1200 bottles of wine behind their damask silk curtains in the suburbs of New
York and Connecticut so that they didn’t have to look into the eyes of the
children of Detroit, whose future they’d raped, Celeste’s mother had told her.   
    Ask a Detroiter, Celeste knew, and you’d see
chagrin about the economic collapse that eats their city away like a lethal
black mold, but you would hear the vision of a remade Detroit where children
could get to school without being accosted with offers of a free hit of an
addictive illegal drug.
    Residents stare off into the distance, telling
stories about how easily stick-ball games in summer or hockey games on frozen
water sprayed from hoses onto driveways in the winter used to bring everyone
out into the open so that families could play together.   
    The remnants of Detroit’s beauty came from the
scrappy hope of its residents that someday things would get better, that the
people would come back, the jobs would return, paychecks and health insurance
could be counted on again, the elderly would feel that they could safely toddle
out onto their front porches and someone would see them and know whether or not
today was a day that could use a helpful visit, an offer to change a light bulb
too high for age-gnarled hands.
    As deeply as she knew Detroit was asleep in
its pain, she wanted to awaken with it.  
    That hope felt dreamlike, Celeste thought.   Like a movie shown on a 30-foot screen
in a darkened theater, it couldn’t hold in the light of day.   But she’d felt that brokenhearted
loneliness herself since her mother had died, since she’d last known what she
was doing for her days, her weeks, her months.   It was time to get back in charge of herself, even if Detroit
had gone unconscious.

Chapter Three

 
    In her sterile low walled cubicle on an
October Friday morning, Celeste unpacked her leather purse, pushing aside the
black taped can of spray paint and the baggie of paint-encrusted stencils.   She placed her lunch container into the
small fridge under the counter and flipped the switch on the pay system.   She watched as it hummed on, red LED
lights flashed until the screen had the usual program on it: Customer Phone
Number, Account Number, Billing Date, Balance Due.  
    The threat of the office closing hung around
her like a shroud.   The laminate
desktops were chipped, the black screen in front of her looked nothing like the
sleek laptops sold in a nearby computer store.   If she squinted her eyes, the office looked the exact same
as it had eight years ago when