I kill the engine at the dead end of the service drive behind the old abandoned station and sit there a beat scanning for movement or sound. Nothing. No one. I get out and walk over the overgrown tracks to the back of the building, duck under what remains of the chain-link fence, the new no trespassing signs the only indication of recent life.

I’m only looking, walking off tension, killing a little time, staying out in the city to avoid going home to an empty house and the feeling that there’s nothing worth anything. I’m only trespassing.

The windows on the bottom three or four floors are all long shot out or broken in and the walls are covered in graffiti, sloughing concrete in plate-sized chunks under overgrown ivy climbers, trees are growing near the windows and doors that let light in.

I duck inside the musty dim of a smaller room and step away from the door and stop and listen. Nothing. My eyes adjust and I can see that the floor is returned to dirt, refuse is cast throughout. A pile of clothes lies half-dumped from a trash bag in the center, campfire ashes off to the side.

I step carefully between the piles slowly scouting the waste: empty cans, broken bottles; a skin mag lying openfaced a blowjob frontispiece barely scrutable on paper wet and repulping down into the earth; a condom in the corner, crusted semen knotted inside; little plastic baggies everywhere; a tampon applicator, scuffed and stained deep brown; a wadded diaper; trampled once-white panties, a hole in the crotch yawning open in the dirt; more.

Castoffs from the fringes, kids and squats and junkies: here to do in a corner what can’t be done out in open, the illicit and illegal, sodomy and ecstasy and oblivion here in the squalor and the dirt and rust and decay. Hasty pleasure is stolen here and the residue is everywhere, it is soaked into the dirt it stains the walls, it is floating in the air and I breathe it in and I feel the feral cells lurking in my marrow triggered, feel it quicken my pulse, feel an ineffable need push me down onto my knees.

I crouch next to the panties and finger the stained hole and the low mean cloying must of decay whelms up into my nostrils. I pick them up and turn them over, the crust of anonymous reckless vagina is caked in the crotch and my head swims with the dizzyingly illicit whom of that fuck that occurred exactly there and I drop them in the dirt in front of me and open my pants and take my dick in my hands and close my eyes and dream of the one-time hunger what rolled here in the filth and the trash and I yank and yank until the image of the pale thighs splayed akimbo next to those panties flashes hot behind my eyes and I come like it is ripped from me and spit hot viscid seed down into the cotton and the dirt.

pale thighs splayed next to those panties