Wall of Truth

The wall was beige. Not because anyone liked beige, but because it hid things. Beige didn’t argue. It sat quiet, pretending the block south didn’t exist—the one with boarded windows and sagging porches. The wall was the line. Cross it, and you didn’t belong.

Then the red showed up. Smears, like kids’ drawings, faces barely faces, eyes like thumbprints. And the hands. Always the hands. Reaching, clawing, like they wanted to pull the wall down brick by brick. The city hated the hands. They painted over them fast, thick coats, like that’d make it go away. It didn’t.

The guy who did it? No one knew. Showed up after midnight, a spray can and a grudge. Every time they wiped him clean, he came back louder. Words this time. “THE WALL KEEPS NOTHING OUT.” Ugly truth, right there in block letters.

They hated him for it. Feared him, really. Not him—what he showed them. He feared them, too. Feared the day they’d bury him under fresh coats and he’d fade like everything else.

But tonight, he painted. A mother and child, hands outstretched across an empty gap. Tomorrow, the city would scrub it clean. But for tonight, the wall told the truth: there’s no line. There never was.