The City of Depression
by Avital Gad-Cykman
Glimmers crawl like larvae in dirty puddles left by hours of drizzling rain. Slippery stones tilt each step, teasing the body’s balance, the near-symmetry of legs, threatening to twist an ankle. A line of adjoining houses stands like a stalled train, their surfaces peeling, throwing angled shadows across a ghostly uneven street. Steady drizzle blurs the eyes, but from this hollow in the landscape it is impossible to glimpse the hilltops at sunrise anyway. Chilly darkness clenches like a fist around passersby.
This month, a man in his fifties strangled by blood clots, has lost his ability to speak. His mouth twists and his eyes roll as he surveys the ruins of his brain, searching for a way out. To reach others, he needs one word-that’s all. The right word, to pull him back from a loneliness stretching forever without it.
We walk through the city of depression and no one speaks. Our feet hurt, our heads are bursting, our hands reach out without finding anything solid to grasp, something to hold. We pass each other without looking. Then a whistle. Someone sings something old, a children’s song.
The man turns his head. He listens. The song is about a garden. And a boy. A memory spirals open.
And there it is.
A flower.
Avital Gad-Cykman is the author of the story collections Light Reflection Over Blues (Ravenna Press) and Life In, Life Out (Matter Press). She is the winner of Margaret Atwood Studies Magazine Prize and The Hawthorne Citation Short Story Contest, twice a finalist for the Iowa Fiction Award and a six-time nominee for the Pushcart. Her stories appear in Spectrum, The Dr. Eckleburg Review, Iron Horse Review, Prairie Schooner, Ambit, McSweeney’s Quarterly and Michigan Quarterly, twice in Best Short Fictions, W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International anthology and Best Microfiction 2025. She lives in Brazil.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “The City of Depression”? I wrote this flash, thinking of my beloved brother-in-law, who had a stroke earlier this year. His admirable struggle with aphasia, a condition that limits a person’s speech, and the huge difficulty of that man who’d always excelled in communication brought to my mind the image of being lost in a city. Fortunately, the first word appeared, and then others.
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