Rebirth Station

The small brightly lit room is just off a highly trafficked street, but it is late night and the cars are no longer passing by with their screeching tires and rumbling engines.  The pedestrians have all long gone home and the street is almost eerily quiet. 
The room used to be a store front of some kind, but those days are long gone and now it stands almost devoid of personality.  The walls are white and bare- the overhead lighting is blunt in its effectiveness, just bare bulbs screwed into the ceiling.  It is basic at its more stark- like a prison cell.  There are bars over the front plate glass window, which in theory protects the inhabitants from any wandering predators outside.  The window is blocked from the street not just by metal bars but also by a large single piece of white painted particle board. The room is rectangular, efficient in its size. 
Half a dozen people fill the room, all of them sitting in cheap cushioned chairs that are decades old.  There is a heavy set young woman sitting on a chair towards the back left corner,  she has a crocheted multicolored blanket across her knees.  Her skin is pale and her hair is dark and stringy- she looks sixteen or seventeen and very small.  She looks lost in the expanse of the room, lost even though I can see her and she can see me. 
Five feet away from her is a man in his 20s, he has a scraggly blond beard and a tiny pot belly covered by a blue tank top with orange edging.  Next to him, his 2 year old son sits happily on a chair.  Almost all the eyes in the room are on the boy, a somewhat happy and clueless child who does not seem to mind being in the white vacuum of the space.
There is a young woman with dark hair closer to the door.  Her arms are on her knees as she leans over, looking into my eyes. Her face is desolate, her eyes dull and without any expression, like she has seen a thousand horrible acts and closed herself off to all of them, resigned to her fate now.
In front of me, the only thing on the wall, is a cardboard cutout of a TV set.  It is designed to look like an old fashioned analog TV with two knobs that were once used to change channels.  It looks like something left over from an art class, perhaps a project critical of the media. The screen area is grayed out and the entire thing is two dimensional.
It is silent in the room.  I can’t even hear the buzzing of the lights.

IRS Office

The room is windowless and gray.  There are gray fabric paneled cubicle walls, gray carpeting, and a low ceiling.
The center of the large square room is lined with eight rows of chairs.  The chairs are padded and covered with a patchwork fabric design in deep purple hues.  Each seat is latched to the chair beside it by a metal hook along its edge, creating straight rows of eight. 
Along the periphery of the room are cubicles separated by thick gray fabric covered walls. Each separated desk faces the center of the room, though there are walls designed like sliding doors which can be opened or closed. 
There are three cubicles that are open, the rest are blocked by the portable walls.  There is one woman behind each visible desk, each with varying pale skin tones, but with the same portly figure and plump cheeks. 
The desks are gray and long and uniform.  There is a computer with a raised glowing screen and a wired telephone.  Each different desk is decorated with the snapshots of loved ones and tiny figurines and mugs full of pencils. 
Behind the perimeter of desks is another narrow perimeter of walking space which allows movement from desk to desk or easy reference to the several bookcases full of thick tax code books and reference material.
Beside the front door is a black man sitting behind the oversized receptionist desk.  A rope barrier starts at the door and leads towards the reception desk, forcing anyone who might enter the double glass doors to head in one direction.  As patrons enter he hands each one a paper number and motions for them to watch the glowing screen with red numerals. 
Mounted to one of the walls is a large flat screen tv, it faces the rows of chairs and is tuned to a news station.  Close-captioned subtitles move across the bottom of the screen and there are no speakers. Half a dozen people sit scattered among the chairs, each holding a number and staring straight ahead into the glowing monitor. 
Mumbled voices and the muted tap of the women typing on their keyboards is the only sound.

Small Apartment

The brilliant heat of a Duraflame log is burning in a corner fireplace, sending most of its smoke up the chimney, though the small apartment still has the distinct smell of burnt wood. A young woman is laying on her back, stretched out on the thick white carpet of the one-bedroom apartment, her head supported by a large blue plastic bag full of thin folded blankets. Her entire body is facing the fire, the soles of her feet are the closest, standing upright though tilted outwards slightly, taking in the warmth of bright yellow flames leaping towards oxygen.
Two feet from her head, to the left of her body, is a large flat-screen TV. Men in tight primary-colored spandex uniforms run back and forth across a field chasing the illusory ball of dreams. The familiar sound of sportscasters and the low, slightly dull noise from a crowd of thousands fills the small apartment. No conversation can be had over the sound of the TV and no one tries.
Beside the young woman is a large tan dog with wide, floppy ears. The dog is laying next to the girl, pressing into her slightly with warm weight. The dog’s head constantly turns upwards, looking for a hand and affection. As the fingers of the girl’s right hand twirl the dog’s pliable ear round and round, the dog closes her eyes and sinks into the sounds of the room.
Behind the young woman is a plush gray couch. A sheet is stretched across the lower half to prevent the constant attack of dog hair. A short man with thin limbs and a slightly bulging stomach is sitting on the couch, his left hand full of sugar-covered macadamia nuts. Every few seconds he raises his hand and drops a few more into his mouth. He is watching the game before him with mild interest, though he looks around the room every once in a while to see if anything has changed.
A younger man is sitting in the leather armchair beside the couch. His eyes are focused only on the TV. Every few minutes he yells out, cursing some move made by someone thousands of miles away.
Ten feet away from the couch and the fireplace is the kitchen, a small nook without walls that is drenched in overhead florescent lighting. A mother and daughter are in the kitchen. They share the same coloring, pale skin verging on pink, light hair tending towards red, though the mother has taken pains to highlight her short hair in blond streaks.
The mother is moving around the small kitchen rapidly, opening drawers, shutting drawers, turning on the faucet, pulling on the roll of paper towels, opening the oven, closing its creaking door with a muffled bang as the aroma of cooking oranges and cranberries escapes into the scent of burning wood. The mother moves rapidly, repeating the same gestures and movements in quick succession.

A House and Three Couples

The house is tall and white with yawning arches and Spanish trim. With its triangular roof composed of orange tile it resembles an elegant giant milk carton. The driveway is long and steep, leading deep beyond the front porch. This porch is accessible where a concrete walk splits away from the main current of the drive forming little pools of its own with three stairs of the same followed by another open expanse of concrete that flows under the two grand archways and meets, at last, with the main stair. There are fifteen of these that lead up to the front door, each one carpeted in sparkling green artificial grass. It glitters magically, winking back at the sparkle emitted by mounds of petite glistening ice plant in the front yard. The tiny blossoms of violet beam their radiance back up to the sun as if they were smaller solar entities themselves, regal lords subject only to that greater more effervescent King. The door itself is of a solid wood adorned with beautiful carved panels that display the shapes of large four petaled flowers and broad jagged edged leaves.
The windows of the house are closed tight, the blinds looking blindly outward like eyes without pupils, sealed from behind by insulated curtains. Within the house all is dark. The floor is composed of many polished honey blond wood panels. In the darkness the color is lost, but the sheen is apparent so that it seems almost like the face of a mirror but less lustrous. To the left of the front entry way, a carpeted hallway leads to the three bedrooms and a bathroom that waits at the very end of its track. The thermostat, a little square box with a metallic surface, juts from the wall of the hallway, opposite of a closet meant to accept the hats, coats and shoes of those entering the abode. To the right rests the living room hidden behind those tightly closed front windows. Beyond it, separated only by further yawning arches, waits a dinning room with sliding glass doors that open onto a patio as well as a tiny kitchen that occupies the least space of all these three grand rooms, nestled in the corner as an afterthought. Its floor is covered with yellow laminate designed to look like sunny Spanish tiles. There are more windows in the wall behind the dining table but they too are hermetically sealed, complete with blinds and long drapes whose color is that of rusty anchors. The living room and the dining room share the same wood flooring, but in the living room, an enormous Persian rug featuring predominately the colors of deep red and gold, covers most of the surface. There is a clock hung on the little bit of wall between the arches that separate the two rooms. It reads 6 o’clock. There is also a television set on an imposing entertainment center that stands beside the stone fireplace at the end of the rectangular space. It casts the only illumination in ghostly electric blue hues that spill so far out as to dance upon the dark surface of the wood floor before the front entrance.
Tucked into a makeshift bed of sleeping bags and pillows, a young couple lies sleeping oblivious to the images flashing before them. The woman’s hair is long and blond. The man’s hair is similarly toned and while it is shorter than hers, his is also long. On his neck there is a tattoo of a blue rose. Slightly behind them, closer to the front entrance, there are two rust colored arm chairs in which two elderly people sit in their pajamas and robes: an old woman with hair like the younger woman upon the floor but streaked with gray and an old man with short but unruly hair the color of brushed steel. These two watch the images flashing upon the screen with mute fascination. The scene is unfolding in a bedroom amid strewn bed clothes and candlelight, where a woman in a satin negligee is making love to a partner whose face is veiled by the shadows.