Diminished Saints

The trails along Shoal Creek had become his liturgy.

Bryce wandered them in the hours after his Qigong practice, limbs still humming with the slow electricity of movement. Morning light slanted through the cedar elms like old filmstrip, flickering between now and then. He walked without aim, letting the creek draw him. This time of year, the water moved in hesitant trickles, pooled under the bridges like forgotten prayers.

You could tell a lot about the city by who lived beneath its bridges.

There was the woman with silver dreadlocks who spoke to squirrels in biblical cadence. Bryce had seen her collecting pecan shells and arranging them in spirals at the foot of the 9th Street overpass, whispering their names as she worked. There was Danny, always on a lime-green bike with both wheels flat, pedaling out of sheer ritual. He’d once told Bryce that entropy was his therapist. Bryce had nodded like he understood.

At the Central Library, the diminished gathered in their own sort of congregation. Men with sunburned necks sleeping upright in Reading Room chairs. Women with weathered notebooks, drawing endless mazes in pen. The smell of sweat, eucalyptus, and whatever the janitors used on the handrails—Bryce knew it well. The library gave them a kind of dignity. It asked no questions. Offered outlets and cool air.

Bryce liked to sit on the rooftop garden, hidden between solar panels and dying rosemary. Down below, the water shimmered and curved like it remembered being a river. He would read until the text blurred into thought and the page became a mirror. Lately, he’d been revisiting Jesus' Son—those stained-glass pages of damage and grace. He wondered if the city had a narrator like that, someone trying to stitch it all together with amphetamines and hope.

The bridge at 12th Street had a different kind of haunt. A kid—maybe twenty—named Mel, with eyes like windshield glass after a crash. They always had a portable speaker playing MIDI files from old RPGs. Battle themes, mostly. “This one’s from Chrono Trigger,” Mel had said once, holding out the speaker like a communion wafer. “It’s the song they play before the end of the world.”

Bryce had nodded. He understood that one too.

Behind chain-link fences, in the yards of low-slung homes being devoured by condos, he saw other kinds of diminishment. Elderly men in plastic chairs, watching birds that never landed. Women rearranging flower pots that no longer bloomed. Some of them waved. Some didn’t. Time had hollowed them out in quiet ways—suburban entropy instead of street trauma. But it was all the same liturgy.

Shoal Creek, dreamlike and cracked with sediment, flowed on. A ribbon of sediment and secret. Once, it had flooded hard enough to carry away cars. People too. Bryce sometimes imagined the flood as a mercy. A reset. A kind of baptism that didn’t ask for belief.

He paused under the 10th Street bridge, where tags and lichen fought for space. The word VIRGA was spray-painted in fuchsia on the concrete support. Rain that falls but never touches the ground.

Yeah. That sounded familiar.

He lit a hand-rolled cigarette. Not because he needed it, but because the smoke felt like punctuation. He exhaled, watching the wind carry the sentence away.

Shoal Creek didn’t need saving. It just needed witnessing. So did the people who moved beside it, above it, within its strange orbit.

In the distance, the low clatter of the MoPac train again. Always that sound. Like some forgotten god still moving through the city, steel wheels on old rails, dragging memory like a chain.

Bryce turned toward home—or something like it.

The page in his back pocket fluttered when he walked. Like a small wing. Like the bird from earlier, still gliding. Still undecided between sky and story.