I used to think blocks were just stretches of concrete stitched together by bad decisions and city planning. Just addresses. Just places you passed through on your way to somewhere else. But this one—this block—had a pulse. You could feel it if you stood still long enough. A low hum beneath the traffic, beneath the arguments and laughter and police helicopters chopping the sky into pieces. It listened. It always had.
It learned early. Learned the sound of keys rattling in tired hands, metal teeth clacking together like they were cold even in August. Learned the difference between a confident stride and one that was pretending. The way footsteps changed after sunset—not a sprint, never that dramatic, just a subtle quickening, like fear didn’t want to admit its name. Sirens taught it rhythm. Night after night, weaving through the dark, sometimes close enough to make your chest tighten, sometimes distant like a warning meant for somebody else.
By the time people started disappearing, the block already knew who they were.
Nobody ever called it a bad neighborhood. That would’ve been lazy. Too honest. The city had sprinkled just enough money on it to keep hope on life support. New streetlights with that harsh white glow that made everybody look tired. A mural splashed across the side of a bodega nobody shopped at, all bright colors and smiling faces that didn’t live here. Some councilman’s promise about revitalization, about opportunity, about how things were changing.
But the block remembered what it was built on. Remembered the bones under the asphalt. Remembered the fires, the riots, the nights when nobody came when you called. Memory soaked into brick and rebar doesn’t just disappear because somebody painted over it.
The Vanishing of Mrs. Calderon
Mrs. Calderon was the first to go. She lived in a third-floor walk-up that smelled like lavender and old newspapers. She was the kind of woman who fed every stray cat in the zip code and could tell if you were lying about your grades just by the way you walked. One Tuesday, she was simmering a pot of caldo—the steam thick with the scent of cilantro and bone broth.
The neighbors smelled it burning before they realized the door was standing wide open. When the cops finally showed up, they did that half-assed shrug they’re famous for. They said she probably “wandered.” Like a seventy-year-old woman just decides to drift out of existence while her dinner is on the stove. But I saw the kitchen. The linoleum was peeling back near the baseboards, and there was a stain on the wall that looked like a handprint—not blood, but a deep, oily purple that seemed to pulse if you stared at it too long. It reminded me of that weird green liquid in the fish tank at the old Dunlap house, something that didn’t belong in this world.
The block knew better.
Malik’s Shortcut
Seventeen, all knees and elbows, always moving like the ground was trying to catch him slipping. Fast runner. Faster mouth. He talked shit like it was oxygen, couldn’t help himself. Worked part-time at the corner store, cutting school more than he should’ve. Last time anybody saw him, he was cutting through the alley because it shaved two minutes off his walk home.
The alley took more than that.
Witnesses—if you could call the neighborhood junkies witnesses—said the shadows in that alley pooled wrong. They didn’t stretch away from the light; they reached toward it. One minute Malik was there, his sneakers squeaking on the damp pavement, and the next, there was just the sound of a jukebox clicking into place in a house that didn’t have power. It was a garbled, underwater sound, like the city itself was trying to hum a tune it had forgotten the lyrics to.
They found his shoe near the dumpster. Just one. Like the rest of him got picked up and forgot to bring it back.
That’s when the whispers started. Not loud. Never during the day. Hunger was a nighttime word, said low, after you checked the locks and made sure the windows were shut. People said the block was hungry. Said it wanted something back.
I laughed it off at first. You had to. Otherwise you’d go crazy. I’d lived there long enough to know how rumors bred when people were scared and bored and tired of being ignored. Buildings don’t eat people. Streets don’t remember names.
Except… sometimes, late at night, when the city noise thinned out like a receding tide, you could hear things that didn’t line up. Breathing, for one. Not yours. Not anyone you could see. Slow and heavy, like the block itself was catching its breath. Shadows pooled in corners they shouldn’t, stretching too far, bending at wrong angles. And the buildings—Christ—they did look closer sometimes, like they leaned in when you weren’t paying attention, brick shoulders hunching together to whisper.
I lived there long enough to learn the truth.
The block didn’t hunt strangers.
It took people who believed they belonged.
I believed. That was my mistake.
The Walls have bowels
I grew up there. Learned how to ride a bike on that cracked sidewalk, learned how to fight behind the laundromat, learned which houses to avoid and which ones would let you crash on the couch when things got bad at home. The block raised me as much as anybody did. I knew its moods. Knew when to keep my head down and when it was safe to breathe.
The night it came for me, I wasn’t doing anything special. Just walking home after a late shift, feet aching, brain fried. The streetlights flickered like they were having second thoughts, like even they weren’t sure whose side they were on. I felt the pavement shift under my shoes—just a little. Subtle. Like the ground had exhaled.
I stopped walking.
You ever get that feeling when the air changes? When your skin tightens for no reason and your heart starts knocking before your brain catches up? That’s what it was. The block had gone quiet. No cars. No voices. Even the distant hum of the freeway felt muted, like someone had turned the volume knob down.
“Get it together,” I muttered to myself. Talking to yourself is normal when you live alone. That’s what I told myself, anyway.
Then I heard my name.
Not shouted. Not whispered. Just… spoken. Calm. Familiar. Like it had been waiting its turn.
I spun around. Nothing. Just brick and metal and darkness pretending to be empty. My phone buzzed in my pocket, making me damn near jump out of my skin. A text from my sister. You home yet?
Almost, I typed back, thumbs clumsy. Why?
No reply.
That’s when the smell hit me. Damp concrete. Rust. Something old and sweet, like rot trying to remember what it used to be. The sidewalk rippled. I don’t have a better word for it. Ripples spread outward, shallow waves in solid ground, like heat haze but wrong.
I ran.
Or tried to.
My feet felt heavy, like I was wading through thick mud. The block didn’t like that. Didn’t like being refused. The streetlights popped one by one, plunging the block into shadow. Windows went dark. Doors vanished. Every familiar landmark blurred, rearranged itself, like the block was shuffling memories, deciding which ones to keep.
“You live here,” it said. The voice wasn’t one voice anymore. It was many. Mrs. Calderon’s tired sigh. Malik’s laugh. Other sounds I recognized but couldn’t place. “You belong.”
I tripped. Hands scraped against the pavement, skin tearing, blood slick and warm. The concrete felt soft under my palms, almost spongy, pulsing faintly. I screamed then. No shame in it. Anybody would’ve.
The ground opened.
Not like a sinkhole. Not dramatic. It just… parted, seams splitting clean, like the block had finally decided to show me what it kept under the surface. Light spilled out, wrong-colored light—purples and sickly greens that made my eyes ache. The smell intensified, memories curdled into something sharp and electric.
I fell.
Or sank.
Hard to tell when gravity starts playing favorites.
I landed in a space that shouldn’t exist. A hollow beneath the block, walls made of layered brick and bone and something that looked like veins threaded through it all. Buildings above me groaned, settling, like they were relieved to let some weight go.
Faces emerged from the walls. Not whole people. Impressions. Pressed-in shapes, mouths open mid-word, eyes hollow and bright. Mrs. Calderon was there, her hands still curled like she was gripping a spoon. Malik, frozen in motion, one foot forward, forever running.
“Why?” I asked. It came out hoarse.
“Because you remember,” the block said. “Because you stayed.”
The light flared. Images flooded in—fires, screams, sirens, blood soaking into soil long before sidewalks covered it up. The block wasn’t cursed. It wasn’t haunted in the way movies liked to pretend.
It was remembering.
Remembering every body it swallowed. Every promise broken. Every life that sank roots into it and tried to grow.
“You don’t get to keep me,” I said, though my voice shook. “I’m not yours.”
The block laughed. The sound cracked the walls, dust raining down like dirty snow.
“Everyone is ours eventually.”
Something snapped then. Maybe it was anger. Maybe it was love. I thought about my sister. Thought about the kids riding bikes where I used to, laughing like the world wasn’t sharp enough to cut them yet. I pressed my bleeding hands into the wall, into the faces, into the memories, and I pushed back.
Pain exploded. White-hot, blinding. The block screamed.
When I woke up, I was lying on the sidewalk, dawn creeping in like it was afraid to get too close. Streetlights dead. Sirens back in the distance. My hands were scarred, palms etched with lines that hadn’t been there before.
People said I must’ve passed out. Heat exhaustion. Stress. That’s what they always say when they don’t want to listen.
The disappearances slowed after that. Not stopped. Just… spaced out. Like the block was being careful. Like it was waiting.
Sometimes, late at night, I hear it breathing again. Calling my name. Reminding me.
It’s still hungry.
And it remembers me now.
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