20th Century Relic

The building looked like it had been peeled straight off a postcard from 1986, back when neon was the future, and everyone believed in progress. Its pastel facade, once described by some realtor as “perfect for Miami Vice,” had turned to chalk and mildew. Now it stood as a monument to failed ambition.

The parking lot told its own story, with cracked asphalt, fissures filled with weeds clawing toward daylight. The cars were ghosts of commuters past, faded sedans, a sun-bleached van, a coupe with two flat tires.

The trees had grown wild, their branches draping over the sidewalks and swallowing the signage whole. Behind the building, tents and tarps leaned together in shabby solidarity, flapping in the stale breeze.

Homeless people lived there now, feeding off the building’s slow decay like parasites on a dying animal.

Every weekday morning, Martin trudged through it all with his key card ready, as if the motion alone might still mean something. He’d been coming here for years.

The same walk from the parking lot, same flickering security light, same smell of damp carpet and burnt coffee. There was comfort in the repetition, but it had soured lately.

The faces had changed. Most of them were kids now, polite but distracted, all earbuds and Slack messages. They looked at him with that faint pity people reserve for things that used to matter.

He’d once had a corner office. That was before “the restructure.”

Now he sat in a cubicle under a buzzing fluorescent light that hummed like a migraine. His title, Senior Systems Analyst, had long since lost its meaning.

He was the last man standing from his original team. Every Friday, he’d tell himself: Just a few more months.

Ride it out until retirement. But lately, that word didn’t sound like freedom, but erasure.

At lunch, he’d sit in his car, the air thick with the smell of sun-baked vinyl, and watch the others walk to the café across the street. The new crowd laughed too loudly, optimism staged.

He’d light a cigarette, though the smoke irritated his throat now, and imagine just driving away, heading west until the gas ran out, but he never did. He always went back inside, swiping that damned card, waiting for the green light.

One evening, he stayed late, the office emptied and silent, except for the faint rattle of the air conditioning. Outside, the sky was bruised purple.

He stared at his monitor, at the spreadsheet columns that had defined his life in microcosm, hours, dates, names. None of it mattered.

He shut it off and packed his things slowly. The photo of his ex-wife, a coffee mug from some long-forgotten conference, a dead plant he’d never thrown away.

As he left, he walked around to the back of the building. The encampment was still, shadows hunched beneath blankets.

He saw a man digging through a garbage bin, collecting cans in a shopping cart. Their eyes met briefly.

Neither looked away. For a moment, Martin felt the strange, magnetic pull of recognition.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his key card. The plastic rectangle that had granted him entry, that had tethered him to the illusion of purpose. He dropped it into the man’s cart without a word.

“Won’t open much,” Martin said, voice flat.

The man grinned, toothless, and shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. It’s something.”

Martin nodded. He turned toward the street, hands in his pockets, walking past the cracked asphalt and the dead cars. He didn’t look back.

The building stood behind him, hollow and waiting, like an old stage set for a show no one filmed anymore. By the time the streetlights flickered on, he was gone, just another twentieth-century relic stepping out of frame.