Atrium After Rain

At dawn the abandoned mall exhales cold light, escalators sleep like folded tongues of steel, ferns practice their green cursive through cracked terrazzo, and rainwater keeps a slow drum in the food court.

Mannequins wear sleeves of dust and pollen, their glass eyes full of drifting gnats and weather. From a skylight split like an old bell, sun pours in, bright as a whetted knife.

A child’s coin still waits in the dry fountain, copper moon in a bowl of leaves. Above it, ivy climbs the directory map, renaming every store with roots.

By noon the atrium smells of wet bark and ozone, pigeons lift like handfuls of torn receipts. What commerce failed to keep, silence tended: a market of light, moss, and patient air.