Shortcut

It was 31 degrees, and the sun was starting to cut through the remnants of a series of flurries that dropped a few inches of snow overnight. The bus was running late, and people were grumbling at the stop outside of the laundromat, the snow around their feet slowly being churned into a gray slop. Traffic was just starting to back up on its way toward the train station up the street. It was a normal morning except for one thing: it was the first day that a car would drive into the hole and never be seen again.

The hole was in a parking lot off one of the busy streets leading downtown through the city’s outer neighborhoods. Development had finally pushed past the southern terminus of the subway, past the old bus yard and the rusting hulk of a bridge that had been a barrier to the neighborhood, or maybe for it, until then. The owner of the building that the little convenience store was in—the one that mostly sold candy, homemade arepas, and lottery tickets—had decided to build some apartments above the store. Then he’d decided to expand the foundation of the building to fit some more in. Papers were filed, meetings took place, and the plans were approved.

On a Saturday morning at 8 o’clock, heavy equipment came and started to dig. The asphalt of the parking lot was quickly transformed into rubble, and the soil underneath excavated and put into piles. Both were then loaded into trucks to be taken wherever unwanted dirt and chunks of asphalt end up going. Then, just as quickly, the work stopped, the trucks disappeared, and a front loader slowly drove off, cars angrily passing it as it turned onto the street.

Days passed and people began to wonder when the rest of the work would start. Then weeks, and finally months, had come and gone. As winter began to set in, food wrappers and empty bottles started building up in the hole, then a spare tire with a gash in it. By the time the traffic cones and caution tape that had been marking the hole off ended up sitting in it, a new year had begun. Everything disappeared under snow for the first time in years. And then the snow just kept coming.

The people at the bus stop started talking about the weather instead of when the work would be finished—the most snow in 11 years, or was it 12? They scarcely noticed that morning as a blue Corolla turned down the street next to them and then turned again into the narrow parking lot behind the convenience store, cutting through toward the apartments next door since the alley that led directly to them was impassable, blocked with broken bikes, a car bumper, and half a pallet.

Witnesses later said that the sound they heard next wasn’t violent like they thought it should be in retrospect. Not like a car slamming into wet compressed gravel and scraping across broken asphalt and buried chunks of conglomerate rock, but more like something being inhaled, or like the sound a sudden gust of wind makes in the woods before just as quickly subsiding. They said that the front of the car dipped into the hole and then it was like the car just ceased to exist.

Emergency lines were called, and emergency crews dispatched, the first responders expecting to give serious, but not life-saving medical care, do a cursory investigation, and eventually call a crew to pull a car out of a hole. They didn’t believe the phone calls that said the car had vanished. How could they? The police were somehow the first to show up and when they got to the hole, they thought they’d been pranked. There was no car. Just tread marks that seemed to stop at the edge of the hole, the fresh snow below them sitting undisturbed. They cautiously looked around the parking lot, slowly walking around the edge of the hole, looking for some sign of an accident or, failing that, to get a look at who was messing with them, somebody laughing in a window that they could maybe rough up and teach a lesson to.

When the paramedics showed up a few minutes later, one of the cops said something like, “Unless you’re planning on giving first aid to that tire in there, you’re wasting your fucking time,” and the group walked around the hole again, the cops again looking around the parking lot, then the apartments behind it, waiting for something to happen other than time passing. Finally, both pairs let their dispatchers know it was a prank and went on with their days.

When the second car went in a couple weeks later, the 911 calls barely got a cruiser to show up and that wasn’t until an hour and a half had passed. Even then it was to just confirm it was another prank. But the neighborhood knew. People had seen the cars go in. The hole became all anyone could talk about. Rumors were spread with friends and family, on social media, at the store, the bar, the bus stop—wherever they could be spread. It was a sinkhole that was going to swallow up the whole neighborhood and the authorities were trying to keep in under wraps; it was some kind of experiment gone wrong—the first car had a science student from the local college in it, didn’t you hear; or the construction workers had hit some kind of treasure, or government secret, or ancient evil.

By the third car, people had cameras trained on the hole from their windows and caught it going in. The videos went viral and were dismissed as doctored, camera tricks, or AI deepfakes, but fervor filled the neighborhood and then began to spread to the rest of the city. Finally, it got loud enough that City Hall noticed and people from Inspectional Services came. They walked into the hole, banged around with a shovel for a few minutes, and declared that it was just a normal hole. When a fourth car went in, more people began to watch the hole, some who had only ever seen the neighborhood as a cut through even started taking longer routes home so they could stop by the hole and see if they could see anything strange.

Finally, the sensible people, the ones who didn’t care about having the best story, or being on the news, or being the one who figured out what was going on, got louder about wondering why the landlord didn’t finish the project, or at least pour some concrete and maybe bring an end to everything. Rumors swirled again. The owner hadn’t pulled the right permits. He’d overextended his credit. He’d ripped off some investors and skipped town. He was the investor who got ripped off and somebody else had skipped town. Or he’d simply gotten sick or maybe fallen in love with someone or something other than money.

All the while cars kept falling in the hole. People still had to get to and from the apartments. They still had to go to work and see family and friends and get food and do all the other things people have to do. Life can’t stop just because there’s a hole you might disappear into. Eventually, it became an accepted part of life. People move on quickly in neighborhoods like that one. And when it comes to neighborhoods like that one, the attention of the rest of the city moves even faster.

Finally, spring came, and the snow melted. The hole was completely revealed and there was nothing special waiting at the bottom. It looked like Inspectional Services was right after all. Some trash, empty bottles, cigarette butts, vape cartridges, a spare tire with a gash in it, and some traffic cones. Mud, broken chunks of asphalt and conglomerate rock, an impressive nest of rats.

Whether because of the improved weather or because the owner’s permit or credit or love situation had improved, work finally started back up, the sounds of heavy equipment filling the neighborhood again. The people at the bus stop talked about the work finally starting back up and smiled at the new warmth in the morning air even if they were running just a few minutes later than they’d like to be.

Brenden Layte is a writer, linguist, and editor of educational materials. His work has previously appeared in places like X-R-A-Y, Lost Balloon, and Pithead Chapel. He also won the Forge Literary Magazine’s 2021 Flash Fiction Contest. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and tweets at @b_layted.