Kinda Complicated

Hauntings & Trepassing

Inside, the mall is a cathedral that has intentionally gone stale. The air is thick with the scent of mold and car exhaust from a decade of illicit parking. Light filters through in bruised patches, illuminating fuse-boxes torn open, columns flayed to the mesh, a riot of spray paint and ghosted stickers for brands that barely exist anymore. Mikey pauses to consider the way the sunlight picks out the ''Forever 21'' glitter lettering now half-scraped from a bay of busted windows. He digs in his backpack for his voice recorder, but for a moment all he can do is stand there, inventorying the smell, the silence, the inside-out logic of a space whose only future is as backdrop to amateur break-ins and failed YouTube urban explorers.

Ash moves ahead, his footsteps loud on the warped linoleum, and Mikey follows, the echo of their sneakers chasing them down a corridor lined with dead salons, a vape shop, the crusted shell of a cinema. Each storefront is a diorama, frozen on the day the rent check bounced: calendars still at March, sample perms dangling from mannequins, a pile of Christmas garlands collapsed in the corner of a discount shoe outlet.

''You know what this reminds me of?'' Ash asks, glancing sideways as if he expects an answer but isn’t quite sure what he’s hoping to hear.

''Unclaimed baggage claim,'' Mikey suggests, gaze skittering over the fossilized shelf talkers and a gutted claw machine upended in the middle of the thoroughfare. The memory is so vivid he can almost taste the dusty air of the regional airport, every suitcase packed for a future that fell through. ''Or maybe a time capsule for people who didn’t make the cut for history.'' He keeps his voice low, out of instinct or reverence, he can’t tell.

Ash nods, raking a hand through his hair. ''It’s more honest like this. No one’s pretending the frozen yogurt tastes like anything but chemicals and regret.'' He steps closer to a shuttered Wetzel’s Pretzels, finger-tracing a line in the grime that spells out ‘HELP’ before smearing it to nothing. Mikey’s camera phone is out before he can second-guess himself , and he snaps a photo of Ash’s hand mid-gesture, then another of the fogged stainless counter, the menu letters gone wobbly with age.

''You ever think about what it took to build all this?'' Mikey says, rolling the recorder in his palm before clicking it on. The machine chirps, waits. ''Like…how many architects, workers, planners—how many family meetings to decide if the food court should have a Sbarro *and* a pizza hut? All that ambition just…'' He gestures at the collapsed shadow of a ceiling tile, the mulch of insulation and mall-walker leaflets mulching in the runoff of a leaky roof. ''Entropy wins,'' he says, letting it settle.

Ash doesn’t flinch at the existential sledgehammer. He just leans against a support column bowed with the weight above and flicks his gaze sideways at Mikey. ''Everything’s more interesting after it fails. Success is boring. No one remembers a place unless it’s haunted or condemned.'' He squints at the skylight overhead, where a tracery of spider webs pulses with each draft, ''Plus, you know, makes for better stories.''

Mikey feels the truth of it burrow into him. He holds up the recorder, waiting for inspiration, then just starts talking: ''This is Rivergate Mall, east concourse, first exploration. Team is two. First impressions—'' He hesitates, looking at Ash, who’s balanced with his heels on a cracked tile, hands in pockets, chin up like he’s bracing for a punch. ''First impression: It’s a skeleton with its mouth open. Makes you wonder if it ever really was alive, or if it’s just designed to look like it’s gasping for something.'' He clicks pause, feeling mildly ridiculous, but Ash surprises him by nodding, grave as any documentarian.

They wind past a toppled security kiosk, the plastic shields warped by sun and riot. There is graffiti in every language: d**k jokes, manifesto fragments, a delicate cartoon of a kestrel in mid-scream. Mikey can't help reading all of it, even the obscene, as if it forms some necessary sediment. For a second, he wants to ask Ash to pose by the kestrel, but the idea feels too intimate, so he just commits the scene to memory and moves on.

A clatter echoes from the upper tier—probably nothing—but they both pause, counting breaths. Ash’s eyes narrow, hunting patterns in the dust. After a silence, Mikey says, ''I read somewhere that malls were designed like casinos. No clocks, no windows, no escape except through the gift shop.''

Ash grins, soft and tilted. ''You ever see a mall at midnight? It’s like wandering inside a stomach: all blue light, no point of reference. I used to break into the old Northland center with a couple of idiots from school . We’d play hide-and-seek with the rent-a-cops until somebody got caught and snitched or we got bored and moved on. Only time I ever felt like a ghost before I even died.'' He lets this hang, then toe-taps a metal strip in the floor, as if checking for hollows in the story.

Mikey considers the image: Ash as a gawky teenager, all elbows and mischief, haunting a palace built for a bygone optimism. ''Did you ever get caught?''

Ash shakes his head, but his smile has an undertow. ''Not by security. But one time we found a guy in the pet store, weeks after they’d shut the place down. He’d broken in just to feed the parakeets. Really gentle, weird old man. Didn’t leave a name. He’d sneak in after hours, dump seed everywhere, then just sit and listen to them sing in the dark. When Animal Control finally cleared the cages, the whole flock had survived—no thanks to the system, just a random guy who couldn’t let it end like that.'' Ash shrugs, but Mikey sees the muscle jump in his jaw, and for a moment the wreckage of the mall smooths out to something sacred.

''I like that story,'' Mikey says, a little surprised at how much he means it.

Ash shrugs again, but it’s a softer gesture, his knuckles whitening where he clutches a bit of rebar. ''Figured you might. Most people just ask if I was huffing paint or smashing windows. Which,'' he admits, ''sometimes, sure.'' He grins, but the cockiness is an extra layer pasted over something older, a sediment of regret. ''But that guy made me think—what if the world’s just a mess, and the best you can do is clean up after a few birds?''

Mikey walks a step ahead, restless, letting the space settle.

Ash stops for a moment,’’Why did your parents call Animal Control when you were in the tent at your grandma’s place?’’ Mikey stumbled, surprised. "I told you the Pop-Tarts story, didn’t I?" Ash nodded, just once, slow. "I thought I was a gone-case: twelve, run away, living out of a tent. Not technically an animal, but the neighbors and my parents thought I was some kind of coyote. Or maybe they just hoped." Mikey hesitated, the faint echo of childhood humiliation dipping the corners of his mouth. "Eventually, I started howling. Just to see if anyone would answer."

Ash scanned his face as if he was reading the code under the words. ''Did anyone?''

Mikey shrugged, half a smile growing back. ''Just my grandmother. She came out with her iPad, filmed me, said she’d send it to Child Protective Services if I made her come back out again. I think she was glad it was just me, not a coyote, honestly.''

They passed the broken lips of a water fountain, the spray nozzle corroded to green, the coin catch full of moldy pennies. Mikey fished in his pocket for a quarter—came up with a dime, which he dropped into the algae without ceremony. ''That’s for the ghosts,'' he said.

Ash watched the coin settle at the bottom, then stepped ahead, scanning the darkness for the next landmark. They’d reached the old food court, still recognizable under the rot: battered plastic chairs tattooed with obscenities, half the tables on their sides, napkin dispensers breeding dust bunnies behind plexiglass. A barnstorm of empty ketchup packets and straw wrappers, glimmering like strange coral, crammed the gutters along the floor.

At the far end, beneath the ruins of a mural advertising ''Taste the World!'' in carwash-pastels, someone had dragged a pinball machine out from a side kiosk. The glass was shattered but most of the lights flickered, on some doomed circuit, a game ongoing even after the players had long since walked away.

Mikey ran his hand along the side, then pressed one of the buttons with a hesitant, self-conscious flick. The machine stuttered to life, the old-school synth screeching as the display spasmed between ''BALL 1'' and a high score that would never be beaten. A steel ball lurched from the gutter, wobbled up a flipper, then rattled down into oblivion. The whole machine rocked, as if resenting the effort.

Ash watched, hands stuffed deep in his pockets. ''You ever play for real?'' he asked.

Mikey shrugged. ''I’m terrible at games. My cousin used to beat me at Mario Kart so bad I’d hide the controllers in the freezer.'' He peered at the pinball, watching its progress through a constellation of dead bulbs. ''I always liked the sound more than the score. It’s calming, in a way. Like you can hear the rules without having to memorize them.''

Ash stepped closer, arms almost brushing Mikey’s as he leaned in, eyes on the worn decals flecked with a residue of stranger’s fingerprints. ''I used to come here on Sundays,'' Ash said, voice just above the hush of machines long starved for power. ''My dad would dump me at the arcade and pick up shifts at the auto body down the block. I’d blow five bucks in quarters, but I’d always save one, just to hear it rattle in my pocket all day. Like the sound was proof I could leave whenever I wanted.'' He popped the collar on his jacket, shivering. ''Never did, though. Not until they turned off the lights.''

Mikey tried to imagine small Ash, all knobby knees and rage, camping out in neon shadows. The idea made his chest ache; he didn’t know if the ache was pity, or the sense of recognition, or something more primitive — the animal part of him that wanted to scoop up all the uncared-for pieces of Ash and lock them in an attic somewhere, catalogued and climate-controlled, so nothing could ever break them again.

Ash leaned in to press the other button. For a moment, their hands shared the steel-flecked detritus of the pinball machine, both pretending not to notice the choreography carefully arranged by physics and maybe something else.

"It’s an old Bally," Ash said, voice low. "I know the guy who used to fix these for the mall. He said the circuit boards never really quit. They just learned new ways to short out." He nudged the side of the cabinet, and the lights fluttered, then settled into a wonky heartbeat.

Mikey tracked the whirring ball, the click and return, the way the table’s logic made sense only if you let it. "Do you think memories are like that? In your head, I mean. Still there, just… learning new ways to break everything?"

Ash considered, both hands now drumming soft against the machine: a backbeat, a way to steady himself. "I don't know," he said."I remember a lot of things," Ash went on. "But only after, you know? Like they didn't matter the first time, so your brain has to run them again until the wiring gets it right." His gaze was on the glass, but Mikey knew he was seeing something else, some old circuit humming under the surface.

Mikey thought about the notebooks in his bag, all the class notes and personal failings, the lists of things he should have said to his sister, to his old best friends, to himself. He wondered if anyone ever solved the maze in their own head, or if it was just a pinball game, forever rigged.

He pressed the button again, and the ball shuddered to a slow halt, the lights spasming one last time before dying altogether. For a moment, the food court felt like the deepest part of the city, the whole world reduced to two people and a dead arcade machine.

Ash pulled his hands away. "We should probably get moving," he said, but didn't, just looked down at Mikey's hand still resting on the machine's console. Mikey's fingers, blunt and ink-scarred, hovered indecisively over the cracked chrome. The impulse to take Ash's hand, to ground the weird pulse in his own skin, ambushed him with the urgency of a panic attack. Instead, he stepped back, knocking his backpack against a chair, and the spell broke.

They drifted the food court, working their way toward the atrium, which was ringed by palm trees in planters and a half-ruptured fountain with a drift of dead leaves crusting the basin. Some early explorers had set a green plastic patio chair on the lip of the fountain, throne-like, and over time the pigeons had claimed it as their own. Mikey watched the birds watching him, heads twitching in relay, as if the mall's new population had developed their own gossip circuit.

It was only when Ash sat in the patio chair—slow and theatrical, like a king at ease in his ruined dominion—that the birds scattered, a judder of wings echoing up into the skylight. Mikey recorded the noise: the scuffle, the settling quiet, Ash’s breath fogging in the cold air that pooled around the fountain.

For a minute, they didn’t speak. Mikey circled the fountain, tossing kernels of data into his recorder: mosaic tile, 1981 vintage, three plaster cherubs corroded to the color of nicotine, and a smell of wet concrete so dense it pulsed. He watched Ash, who seemed practiced at sitting alone in strange places, both shoulders slouched but chin held just above defeat.

''Was there ever water in this?'' Mikey asked, toeing the edge of the basin. ''Or did they just build it for show?''

Ash shrugged. ''There was, when I was a kid. They dyed it blue in honor of some dumb team-building thing. Security once tossed in a hundred golf balls and let kids fish them out for coupons. Eventually, someone flushed a bag of cement down the men’s room and the whole system clogged.'' He eyed the dry fountain, a faint private smile forming. ''If you don’t build in an overflow, everything backs up sooner or later.''

Mikey recorded that line, then repeated it softly, ''No overflow, just… containment.'' He liked the architecture of the phrase, even if it was just about plumbing and not people.

Ash snorted. ''Careful. Capture enough urban myth in there, and someone will stick your name on a bench.''

Mikey felt the recorder’s weight in his hand, thought about saying something important, then saved it, clicking the device off and slipping it into his pocket. ''I’d rather have a fountain.''

Silence. A good, medium-tender silence.

Ash’s gaze drifted up the atrium—three levels of balustrade, fleece-banners for vanished stores sagging like the flags of lost republics. ''You ever wonder who picks the mall soundtrack after the shops all close?'' he asked, mostly to the ceiling. ''Or does the last manager just surrender the playlist to entropy, let the ghosts DJ?''

''Pretty sure it’s always ‘Careless Whisper’ on infinite loop,'' Mikey answered, and Ash nodded, serious.

They let the quiet have them. Mikey perched on the lip of the fountain, shoes squeaking against the mosaic, and Ash slouched deeper in his plastic throne, gaze drifting but not inattentive. This moment, Mikey realized, was what the oral histories never captured: not the grand opening, not the dizzying consumer pastiche, but the pause when the story of a place hovered between being forgotten and becoming legend. Two failures, humming in the dead center of the world’s weirdest mausoleum.

Ash fished in the pocket of his jacket for a cigarette, but the wind had picked up, and even with cupped hands he couldn’t nurse a flame from the battered lighter. He tried twice, then gave up, stowing both objects away with a small, resigned shrug.

Mikey wanted to reach for him, to uncap some secret tender thing, but the view from the fountain lit up an entirely different memory: the two of them as seen from above, featureless ghosts pinned to plastic in a mall so totally abandoned that even the word ''abandoned'' felt like a misdiagnosis. He thought of the parakeets, of the man who’d fed them long after the world stopped asking for them, and it made his throat close up.

''So what do we do now?'' he asked, voice ricocheting off the atrium’s hard surfaces. ''Spit off the balcony and see if it hits a security drone?''

Ash slouched so far down his chair he looked like he might disappear into its shell, then straightened, pushing up with a grunt that was half-joke, half dawning resolve. "Only if you have bail money," he said, but for the first time his voice didn't sound like he expected to be let down by the answer.

Mikey watched Ash's eyes flicker upward, gauging the space between the floors, the trajectory of anything hurled into the void. "Do you ever feel like you could say or do anything here and it wouldn't matter?" Ash asked, not quite waiting for a reply. "Like the world outside runs on rules, but this place—" he waved at the vast husk of the food court, the echoing arcade, the fossilized evidence of millions of afternoons lost—"this place is the afterimage. Nothing sticks, not even the consequences."

Mikey considered that. He tried to picture himself screaming, or smashing a window, or—he glanced at Ash, all wiry energy and slightly-checked want—kissing him, right here, in broad daylight, in a mausoleum for bankrupt capitalism. The thought was so sharp it erased the rest of the world for a full second. He almost said it. Instead: ''That’s probably why I like it here. No one expects you to pretend anymore.''

In the new silence, Ash looked at Mikey like he was weighing a dare. ''Could be.'' He stood, circling the fountain to where Mikey sat. For a heartbeat the world shrank to the length of the mosaic, the wind slicing between their jackets, the low hum of some ancient, never-repaired transformer echoing in their bones. Ash leaned in, close enough that Mikey could feel the static hitch in the air, the zero point where two objects want to collapse into one.

He smelled like wind, like cheap smokes and the recycled cold of the mall. ''You know,'' Ash said, not quite whispering, '' if you wanted to, you could do it. Anything. Right here.''

Mikey’s throat went tight. For a second, he couldn't tell if the coil in his chest was panic or desire, and then he realized, standing inches from Ash, that it was both at once, and that was fine.

He reached for Ash’s hand—no preamble, no joke, just the simple act of two people testing whether the world would break if they stopped pretending. Their fingers met, cold and callused; Ash’s hand spasmed in surprise, then relaxed, fitting around Mikey’s like it had been manufactured for this single purpose.

A measureless interval. The wind tumbled a flake of plaster from above; it spiraled lazily between them, then landed on the toe of Ash’s boot and vanished. Mikey didn’t look away. He could see himself in the glassy surface of Ash’s eyes, and for a second he didn’t look like the afterimage of anything—he looked like something inventing itself in real time, one nerve ending at a time.

It could have lasted a second or an hour, but Ash broke first, an airless laugh slipping out. ''I’m pretty sure we’re trespassing on twenty different levels,'' he said, but didn’t let go. If anything, he squeezed tighter, the bones of his hand a scaffolding for the fragile, breathless calm that was suddenly everywhere. ''I guess we should run,'' Mikey said, not making any effort to move. ''We could. Or we could, I don’t know… stay and see if the ghost mall security wants to join in.''

Instead, they just stood, foreheads almost touching, hands locked in a circuit so perfect Mikey felt every ex-girlfriend, every former friend, every professor with a red pen vanish into the dust of the abandoned food court. He didn’t know if it counted as love—he didn’t know if he even knew what love was supposed to look like, outside of movies or the desperate late-night gush of sitcom reruns—but it was real enough that he worried if he let go, the lights might never come back on.

Ash squeezed—just a little, but enough that Mikey could convince himself it was mutual, that this was something happening, not just an accident weathered together. The electric rush built up inside Mikey, pressing out against his ribs, disbelieving but real. He stood, drawing Ash's hand with him, and for a second neither one let go. The space between them felt lighter, even as the mall's shadows folded in like a proscenium.

Ash blinked, mouth parted, but he held on. He didn’t move first; Mikey did. He stepped forward, enough to close the last half-gap, and in the brittle, echoing atrium of the ruined Rivergate Mall, he kissed Ash.

It wasn’t cinematic. It was awkward, cold, lips dry and a little chapped from nerves and the outside wind.

For a moment, with the afterimage of a dead mall spinning around them, it felt like discovery. Or at least like a new kind of gravity.

They sat together on the fountain’s cracked edge, the plastic chair now abandoned to the pigeons and drifting debris. The light shifted in the atrium, as if the sun had worked out the angle necessary to force the world to keep moving. Mikey watched the dust twirl in columns, reminded of those tiny snow storms you get in the corners of empty buildings: a private weather system, nothing to do with real seasons, just entropy shaking itself clean.

Ash splayed his legs out, hands braced on the tile behind him. For the first time since Mikey had met him, Ash seemed at rest—not still, but stilled. ''You know,'' he said, ''if this place was open, we’d never be able to do this. There’d be a million people, music from hell, and some kid puking up orange Julius right there—'' he gestured at the marble below, ''—reminding us we didn’t belong.'' Mikey nodded, uncertain whether the ache in his chest was relief or maybe a preamble to missing this already. He pressed his thumb to the back of Ash’s hand, tracing a circle, a secret Morse only they could understand.

They sat in a low hush, the kind that followed the aftermath of something bracing and private. The pigeons returned, hesitating at first, then bobbing in to reclaim their dominion. When Mikey’s phone chimed—the noise grotesquely loud in the vacuum—he let it ring out, then pulled the screen from his pocket only because Ash made a questioning gesture with his eyes.

''It’s my advisor,'' Mikey said, skimming the preview. ''Wants to know if I’ve found any ‘compelling artifacts yet.’'' He pronounced the words as if they were a punchline, or a threat. ''Should I send back a selfie of us with the food court pigeons, or is that too on-the-nose?''

Ash snorted. ''If you make it black and white, it counts as art.'' He shifted, their knees touching, an accidental contact that neither seemed inclined to erase. ''You could invent a whole narrative about the symbolic significance of birds in late-stage consumer spaces, and your advisor would eat it up.''

Mikey tucked the phone away, resisting the urge to check it again, and instead let his gaze drift up three stories to the fractured skylights. Each pane caught the afternoon sun as though it were a different hour altogether—above them, the future and the past flickered in and out with every cloud. ''I could,'' he said, voice almost a matter-of-fact. ''But then I’d actually have to write it down, and you’d be stuck coming up with fake citations again.''

''I still have that template for Wikipedia pranks,'' Ash said, a sly grin curdling at the edge of his mouth. ''Somewhere, there’s a footnote that says you coined the phrase ‘feral nostalgia.’ I think you’ll win a Pulitzer.'' Mikey gave him a look that was half exasperation, half adoration. ''That was one time. I stand by it.'' They did a circuit around the fountain, not really walking anywhere, just orbiting each other in slow, lazy ellipses. For a while they didn’t talk at all, just let the last jagged sunlight fill the atrium. Ash snagged another cigarette out of his pocket, but didn’t light it—just twirled it, a totem for nerves that didn’t know where else to go.

Eventually Ash said, ''You think they’ll tear it down?'' His voice was low, tentative enough that Mikey almost missed it. Mikey thought about the circuitry of the building—the river of leaking pipes, the pockmarked miles of cracked tile and ceiling, the ecosystem of birds and rats and squatters that had replaced the suburban dream. He didn’t know if he wanted the place to vanish or to calcify, just so he could keep coming back for a dose of clarity whenever he needed it.

''They’ll have to,'' Mikey said. ''Eventually, the town gets tired of the property taxes and someone decides they can make more money selling mulch or putting up a data center.'' He watched the pigeons, one footed, staking out the fountain’s rim. ''Or they’ll just set a fire and let entropy finish the job.''

Ash nodded, not in agreement but acceptance. ''Kind of hope they never build anything here again. Let it become a field, or a nature preserve for pissed-off birds.''

Mikey grinned. ''A cautionary exhibit. ‘Here lie the bones of commerce. Beware, ye who enter craving pretzels.’''

For a minute, neither said anything, both of them just sitting and watching the shadows lengthen, like two statues commissioned for a future nobody would ever finish. It was the closest to peace Mikey had ever managed on purpose—a peace built from the ruins, not in spite of them.

Ash finally stood, stretching till something in his spine popped, and offered Mikey his hand, mock-chivalrous. Mikey hesitated just long enough to give the gesture its punchline, then took it, hoisting himself up beside him. They walked side by side toward the concourse, their footsteps overlapping until the sound was indistinguishable.

At the exit, Ash kept his hand on the push bar, looking back once more at the food court. ''Second date?'' he said, as if the designation was a dare.

Mikey looked up, left, then at Ash. ''Third,'' he said. ''If you count the laundromat and the housewarming.''

Ash let the door swing open and leaned back so the sunlight caught both their faces, stripped of mall-glare and the smutch of indoor neon. The air outside was full of birdsong and the unreliable warmth of late spring, everything in bloom despite itself. Mikey blinked at the light, the transition from underground to open sky disorienting, but not unwelcome. He felt taller, not just next to Ash but in his own skeleton, as if something had finally learned to stand up straight.

There was a crew of city workers in the parking lot, clustered around a cherry picker meant for mending a streetlight. One of them watched Ash and Mikey emerge from the ruins with a lazy, complicit nod, like maybe they were doing the world a favor by pulling something alive back out into daylight. Mikey dug out his voice recorder, clicked it on: ''Rivergate Mall, external. Exit velocity is approximately optimistic. Recommend repeated observations.''