Shadows on the Slab | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: Shadows on the Slab | Previous Challenge Entry
By Corinne Smelker
10/14/25
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In the gutted bowels of New Jericho, where the elevated trains rattled like God’s own judgment over cracked asphalt, Kyle Harlan scraped by on the edge of oblivion. The city was a concrete coliseum, and Kyle was just another gladiator in the underbelly fights; bare-knuckled brawls where blood bought loyalty and silence was currency. He stuck to the Asphalt Saints, that ragged syndicate of ink-scarred outcasts who peddled oblivion in vials and powder. Adhering to the code meant survival. Kyle’s knuckles were maps of old fractures, his jacket a patchwork of bullet holes mended with duct tape and denial.

Nights blurred into a haze of sodium lamps and siren wails. Kyle’s ritual was the same: score a hit from Silas, that gaunt specter who lurked in the shadow of the derelict cathedral on Ebon Street. The cathedral’s spire leaned like a drunkard’s finger accusing the heavens. Kyle would press his palm to the cold stone wall, feeling the pulse of the city throb through it, and whisper his own heresy: Keep me numb, just one more night.

But on that rain-lashed Tuesday, Silas wasn’t alone. Beside him huddled a figure Kyle hadn’t seen since the orphanage fires ten years back—Ellen Voss, her face a lattice of scars from the blaze that orphaned them both. She wasn’t the wide-eyed girl anymore, clutching rosaries in the dim refectory. Now she wore a threadbare cassock, her hands callused from doling out soup in the cathedral’s soup line.

“Kyle,” she rasped, voice cutting through the downpour like a blade. “You’ve come to cling again? To the vial, or to something that won’t shatter you?”

He laughed, a bark that echoed off the alley’s graffiti-scrawled walls, tags of fallen Saints, their names crossed out in red. “What’s to hold onto, Voss? The saints are ghosts, and the bottle’s the only ghost that bites back.”

Ellen stepped closer and gripped his wrist, not with force, but with that old anchor’s pull that tethered ships in storms. “Cleave means split, too, brother. To break from the rot. Remember the fire? We clung to each other then, praying the beams wouldn’t drop. The sisters said cleave to the Lord, and He held us just enough. You think this,” she nodded at the vial, “is holding on? It’s rotting you from the marrow out.”

Kyle wrenched free, but her words lodged like shrapnel. The Asphalt Saints were calling him that night for a job: shake down a rival crew in the Slab District, a warren of tenements where junkies and rats ruled the sewers. Boss Thorne wanted blood, and Kyle had adhered to Thorne’s shadow since the orphanage, bound by the brutal arithmetic of the streets: hurt or be hurt. But as he trudged toward the rendezvous under the skeletal overpass, Ellen’s face haunted him.

The Slab reeked of urine and despair. The crew waited in a gutted laundromat, steam pipes hissing like serpents. Thorne, all jowls and jagged teeth, clapped Kyle’s shoulder. “Harlan, you stick tonight and send the message.”

The fight erupted in a frenzy of fists and broken glass. Kyle’s first swing connected with a rival’s jaw, but as the man crumpled, gurgling blood, something tore inside Kyle, a rift widening like the chasm in his soul. He saw Ellen in the red spray, her lips moving in silent prayer: Cleave to Me, and I will cleave to you. The words from the old book, half-remembered from orphanage vespers, surged in his mind.

Thorne bellowed, “Finish him!” But Kyle froze, the pipe in his hand trembling. The rival crew swarmed, a tide of fury, and Thorne’s eyes narrowed. “Traitor,” he snarled, lunging.

Kyle swung not at the enemy, but at the lie he’d clung to. The pipe glanced off Thorne’s arm, and chaos swallowed the room. Kyle bolted into the storm, rain cleansing the blood from his hands, his heart pounding with the thunder.

He staggered back to the cathedral, collapsing against its wall. Ellen found him there, her silhouette a beacon in the gloom. She knelt, pressing a damp cloth to his split lip. “You cleaved,” she murmured, not a question.

“From them,” Kyle gasped, the vial shattering under his boot in the muck. “To... to this.” He gestured at the ruin around them, the city’s underbelly, but his eyes lifted to the fractured sky. For the first time in years, the weight lifted, not gone but shared.

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