Over the course of time, the Blvd. slowly underwent a transformation. Each dark event added its own particular element of negative energy to the stew: the driver of a pickup pulling a trailer slammed on his brakes and his trailer jackknifed, hitting a twelve year-old girl, killing her instantly. A woman and her daughter were both decapitated in a collision with a semi, their heads found later in the back seat of their car. A pedestrian was hit and severed at the waist as he tried to cross a sidestreet; each trauma was duly noted in the local paper, and soon forgotten, after police reports had been filled out and insurance money had changed hands.
Claims adjusters and morticians made their calculations in dim offices as loved ones mourned and witnesses went home to confront their nightmares. The heat rising from the Blvd. distorted the crawling traffic as stray dogs licked the last traces of blood and shit and lymph from the pavement.
The Blvd. settled under the heat of the July sun. Drivers pounded their horns and shot each other the bird. Blows and gunfire were exchanged. Children learned to distinguish the sound of police sirens from those of ambulances, as they had learned to breathe shallowly in the toxic atmosphere, to avoid the ache that crouched in the bottoms of their lungs. Helicopters shone spotlights throughout the neighborhood at night, searching for the robbers of the convenience store where the children bought their candy after school.
The Blvd. became dependant upon its regular diet of carnage and death, accepting each sacrifice of spilled motor oil, radiator fluid, and blood as its due. People who had lost friends and family members to it moved away as others arrived, their rental trucks crouched by the curbs as they carted their possessions inside, polluted sweat stinging their eyes.
Young boys traded access to their flesh for cheap toys and trinkets, offered by aging men with shaking hands and wet eyes. Women expelled their daughters from their homes in jealousy over their youth, vitality, and virginity. Bars and churches proliferated. Prostitutes, vagrants and drug dealers were duly rounded up by the local police, while cancer found a home to its liking in the organs of those who played with their dogs in the park. The corpses of murder victims began to populate the dumpsters behind bars and the trunks of abandoned cars. Shrubs and trees yellowed and died, while the sight of strange subterranean fungi surfacing in neat suburban lawns became accepted as commonplace. Human teeth accumulated in the sewers. Tumors blossomed and spread inside of stray dogs and cats, who were abandoned and left to fend for themselves in the bad parts of town.
Young couples eagerly established their own families. They had boys and girls and gave them the popular names; they bought a second car, and adopted a dog, and maybe a cat. To accommodate them, vineyards and orchards were bulldozed to make way for more tract housing. Birds began appearing dead in the streets. Neighbors screamed obscenities at one another from front yards.
Certain men watched a river of blood and bones flowing down the Blvd. and considered themselves mad; others charted the flow of traffic in pie charts and graphs, and were paid handsomely for their efforts, using the proceeds to purchase homes far away from the Blvd.
