Greenhouse in the Ruined Mall

Escalators stand still, two silver tongues asleep, yet lettuce lifts its wrists toward sodium dawn. Rain ticks through a crack in the skylight, and old sale banners flutter like molting birds.

Root trays glow where mannequins once kept their balance, their blank shoulders now racks of basil and mint. A pump hums basso beneath the tiled atrium, water climbing pipes the way memory climbs a throat.

I walk the food court and breathe wet chlorophyll, past shuttered logos softened by moss and light. Tomatoes hang like small planets in red weather, orbiting the patient hands that tend them before sunrise.

Outside, parking lines fade into meadow. Inside, each leaf writes a bright refusal. The building that sold us hunger now grows an answer, quiet as steam, stubborn as morning.