Not even the parking lot escaped. Brown leaves blew around in it until they turned to dust and attained the minimal freedom to blow onto empty windows and cling there forever. The outlines of parking spaces have grown faint and cracked. Mute markers for cars that will never park in them. Their fading geometry, their orderly decay. The curbs collapsed inward, sucked into the frozen asphalt maelstrom, uncrossed, unparked-in, uninhabitable, silent, at-rest parking lot. Rain slides off slick stains, all that’s left of cars long gone, dead cars towed away. The Haunted Mini-Mall, No. 5 by Ginger Mayerson Collage on paper 10″h x”7w
Photos of cozy homes in the murky windows of the realty office. Desirable residences still beckon, their equity siren song now silent behind smeared sepia. They look ancient, cast away in suburban wastelands. Once designed for gracious living, dreamhomes entombed, haunted by proxy. The Haunted Mini-Mall, No. 4 by Ginger Mayerson Collage on paper 10″h x”7w
Bags of chips in the convenience store lay helpless beneath the last flickering fluorescent. One by one, the glowing ceiling tubes flashed out their unintelligible semaphore until the last one stuttered an incomprehensible SOS witnessed only by processed foods in various states of their own decay. A grim landscape of garish packaging bathed in fluorescent lightning. The Haunted Mini-Mall, No. 3 by Ginger Mayerson Collage on paper 10″h x”7w
The optometrist shop still insists “We’re Open!” to no one. Lens-less frames have grown dusty staring straight ahead at nothing, perched on shelves, abandoned in displays. Eyeglasses exiled from any grateful eyes they might have once graced, and now, never. A lack of vision, uncorrected by lenses, an unfocused view. The Haunted Mini-Mall, No. 2 by Ginger Mayerson Collage on paper 10″h x”7w
One day it just closed, quietly. The last lock on the last door of the last surviving store clicked home, quietly, so as not to disturb the silence inside and outside, and in the parking lot, too. Does sunshine make noise? Does the moon whine as it wanes? Not in these ruins. The Haunted Mini-Mall, No. 1 by Ginger Mayerson Collage on paper 10″h x”7w
