The silence of the morning was like an empty chamber. He could see from the window that there was nobody down there. Maybe someone huddled in a doorway. Alone with nothing knowing that no pedestrian would be walking to the coffee shop or bakery or bank and taking a second to lean toward them with a scrap of an under cooked scone or the schrapnel of small change they forgotten was in their jacket pocket. The street lights going from green to yellow to red managing the traffic that wasn’t there, hadn’t been there for days. The storefronts were abandoned, too, all the workers who would have normally been arriving to earn their pay in their hooded jackets through the back doors just after the dawn light still stuck in their apartments in the distant parts of the city. Wondering what the fuck, this scrap of cloth across their mouth somehow protecting them from oblivion.

They weren’t there. Nobody was there.

Looking down on the empty street was like looking down on a scale model of a city devoured by insignificance. It seemed right that this place would be so listless and halted. That every store front was ripe for plunder and that plunder was useless, insignificant, pathetic. Who would want this, what would be the purpose of stealing anything from here? What could you possibly selll it for and to whom?

It was perfect. It was everything that he ever wanted. Empty, dead, without value.

It was then that he decided to to leave the window and walk the back stairs to the alley out behind the restaurant that he had been living above for the last several years.

The silence that he could only sense from above was more profound when he felt the breeze on his cheek and his boots on the crumbling concrete of the alley.