On A Quiet Street Novels & Stories

But with every step deeper in, the quiet was more oppressive. The street that I was driving on wasn't straight out, though--I was driving down a small curvy road that wound along through the trees and took my course away ways. It was crowded this latter part of the hour, too, with folks coming home this same small way. It was empty tonight, though. I wrapped my bag straps around the palmar surfaces of my hands tightly, my flesh folding into thick fabric. My footsteps were the only sound in stiff silence, the muffled crunch of them on hard ground.

I took the vial and straightened up. Stood for a moment in the bedroom. The room was very quiet. Outside the window, the street had the ordinary sounds of a residential afternoon — a car, a distant voice, the particular texture of a neighbourhood that was going about its business. Normal sounds. The sounds of a life that belonged to someone else. I went back downstairs.

The reporters have moved on. I sit by the window, watching the street. The trees are bare, their branches like bones against the grey sky. A car passes. A woman walks her dog, a small brown thing on a long leash. A man jogs past, his breath fogging in the cold air. A delivery truck idles at the corner. No one watches from the fire escape. No one stands in the shadow of the old oak tree. No one hides behind the parked cars. The street is empty. The world is quiet. But I do not trust the quiet. I have learned not to.

I pick the heavy thing up and lug it around to the front, even though Elizabeth protests and says I shouldn’t go through any trouble. But doing anything to see her smile will never be trouble for me. “I’m starting to really love this quiet,” she whispers, looking up and down the street. It’s dimly lit from a few street lamps and porch lights. I set the telescope down on the sidewalk and adjust it until the moon comes into view. “It’s really bright tonight. It looks ajonome,” I say her and step aside so she can have a look. A car drives by on the street perpendicular to ours, rolling through the stop sign. Things are pretty quiet downtown once night falls, but it doesn’t become a ghost town.

Susan is humming to herself as she walks on the road, heading home. She crosses the road and walks by a narrow alley. Her apartment building is only a few blocks away and even though she lives in an upscale neighborhood, the area is quite desolate. The parking lot is nearly empty and the roads are quiet too.

"Does this person have a soul? Down with the ingrate!" Alfie arrived with a few security guards to disperse the crowd, but I raised a hand to stop him. "No need to chase them away." I walked right up to Quinn's camera. Looking directly into the phone where comments were flying by, calling for my head, I flashed a smile. "Since you've started a live stream, let's have the whole Internet weigh in on this." I pulled a stack of documents from my bag and displayed them to the lens. "Everyone, since my cousin claims I've stolen the family fortune, let's do the math.

But there was something beneath it, an edge to the calm. The car turned off the main street into a quieter neighborhood, the bright noise of downtown falling away behind them. Trees lined the sidewalks, and little boutique shops and understated restaurants lined the narrow streets. They stopped outside a place Noah wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. No sign. No valet. Just a small entrance with warm, ambient light spilling from behind smoked glass windows. Sterling stepped out first, walking around the car to open the door for Noah. Noah raised an eyebrow. "You gonna pull out my chair too?"

Third Person POV "I need more information," Kali said to himself. The street had grown quieter as night settled fully over the neighborhood. Soft yellow lights glowed from the windows of nearby houses, and the distant hum of traffic faded into the background. The cool evening breeze carried the faint scent of street food from a vendor several blocks away. Kali remained standing outside the green-painted house after the door had closed earlier. The brief conversation he had managed to start had already revealed more than he expected, but something told him there was still more buried beneath the surface.

Sara made sure to thank her bus driver, allowing him to pinch her nipples for a brief second before getting off. The walk home was also rather relaxing too. Only one or two elderly women were loitering about the roads or near the sidewalk as they shuffled past each other, nobody was in sight. Sara enjoyed the silence of the streets as she strolled along with them in front of her house, the only sound was the occasional passing car and the occasional dog barking somewhere far away, however, even those were drowned out by her music. After about five minutes she reached her house, pulling the door open before taking a step inside.

Wanting to help someone but not knowing how to. "I don't know what to do to calm her down." She was quiet for awhile, not taking her eyes off the road. She made a turn. I sighed and looked out the window. We were still on the west side of the estate. The occasional old houses with vines and creepers decorating the sides and roofs of the houses as proof. The West was known for the amount of old houses that were situated there and their love for music and plants. There seemed to be a florist shop or a vinyl store on every street.