Flash Fiction: Ghosts in the Steam

Pittsburgh is a city that billows steam from everywhere. He thinks it’s ghosts. After all the town is filled with skeletons of buildings that used to be alive, their boarded up windows staring like the empty eye sockets of a skull. There are husks of factories lining the three great rivers that converge and give the city its strength. It doesn’t bother him. He likes seeing tangible remains of the past in the present. Pittsburgh is proud of its past and he thinks it should be. He wonders if he visited other cities if they would display what they once were as unselfconsciously as Pittsburgh does.

Whenever he sees steam he stops to watch it for awhile, even if he’s running late for a meeting or a dinner date. Whether it’s curling out of a vent on the sidewalk or drifting from a smoke stack on one of the factories that hasn’t fallen silent, that still makes clunking noises throughout the day, he stops and stares, looking for the ghosts. They turn this way and that in the spires of steam, looking at what their city has become, before fading into the air to join all the less tangible bits of history that still reside here. He is sure that some of these wisps have been cycling through the water here since before this place was called Pittsburgh. The power of the rivers mixing and joining has kept consciousnesses here for longer than he can imagine.

Some day he will be one of them and he will watch the city continue to change. He will see its strength ebb and flow with the shifting paths of the rivers–he may even stay at this conflux of rivers long after the city is gone. He will see the eye sockets lighten as life comes back into a building. Sometimes when he drifts out of a vent, becoming tangible for just a moment so he can see what has changed since he last looked around, since he was last breathed in and out by the people who shape this place, he may see someone watching him rise into the air, twisting in the wind. He may see someone who knows that he is part of the history of this place, and is sticking around to see what happens next. But now, he is late for dinner.