Stop Cropping Out The Tents

The Santa Ana Riverbed stretched out like an open scar, a concrete artery running through the county, wide and dry until the rains came. Chain-link fences tried to hide it, but everyone knew what was below. Tents stitched from blue tarps, shopping carts stacked like ribs, smoke curling from burn-barrels. The city called it blight. To Tia, it was soil.

She crouched low against the wall, can hissing in her hand. The desert bloom grew under her fingers—petals flaring, thorns sharp enough to draw blood if you leaned too close. A prickly pear the size of a billboard. She had a way of coaxing color from gray, her paint eating into the concrete as if it belonged there.

Around her, the encampment stirred. A man in a green beanie dragged a mattress from the weeds. A woman with a face full of tattoos smoked and watched. Kids played with a shopping cart, their laughter echoing against the slope. The whole place was alive, no matter how hard the county tried to declare it dead.

When the last petal bloomed, Tia leaned back, wiping sweat and paint from her forehead. The flower stared back. For a second, she swore its skin rippled, as if wind moved across it, though the air down here was still as stone. She blinked, but the shimmer didn’t stop. The petals seemed to exhale dust, breathing in sync with her lungs.

“Looks real,” the tattoo-

faced woman called out.

Tia shrugged. “It’s supposed

to.”

A flock of pigeons burst from the overpass, cooing like static. Their wings slapped air thick with heat and piss and asphalt. In the echo, Tia heard her own name, drawn out, syllables warped, Tiiiii-ah, Tiiiii-ah. She shook her head and uncapped another can. She painted until the sun dipped, until the concrete walls turned pink and gold, until the shadows of freeway traffic sliced through her flowers.

That’s when she noticed him:

A stranger at the top of the

riverbed,

clean white sneakers,

expensive camera slung

around his neck.

He didn’t ask.

Didn’t climb down.

Just lifted the camera and

clicked, clicked, clicked.

Each shutter like a nail in

her ribs.

She wanted to shout, this isn’t yours. But he was already smiling, scrolling, satisfied. He looked at her mural like it was a fish he’d caught, already imagining it fried up on someone else’s plate. The man lifted two fingers in a lazy salute, then vanished back over the fence.

Tia stayed crouched, spray can rattling faint in her palm. She could feel the flower breathing heavier now, like it had just been stolen out from under her, roots ripped without a sound. Above her, the pigeons gathered on the overpass rail, gray eyes glowing copper in the sunset. They opened their throats and murmured again, soft and strange: Tia, Tia, Tia.

The photo didn’t just vanish. It bloomed. By the next day, Tia’s mural was circling Instagram, tagged with hashtags that made her itch: #UrbanBloom, #ConcreteRebirth, #StreetArtVibes.

The comments rolled like tide: genius, a visionary, this deserves a gallery. Nobody mentioned the encampment, the tents, the faces behind the tarps. They cropped all that out, like weeds cut from a bouquet.

That’s how the man found her again.

He came in a suit too clean for the riverbed, shoes that had never touched dirt. His sunglasses made the world bounce back in mirrored fragments. He crouched as if the stench couldn’t touch him, then handed her a card: embossed, heavy, letters pressed deep enough to cut. ART COLLECTOR

“We can give your flowers a proper home,” he said. His smile was all teeth, no blood. “We’ll preserve them. Rescue them from… here.” His hand flicked, careless, at the tents. Tia didn’t answer. The flower she’d painted yesterday seemed to pulse behind her, petal edges glowing faint teal in the afternoon light. For a second, she thought it was glaring at him.

At night, she dreamt.

The riverbed filled with water—not rainwater, not sewage, but a flood of clear, impossible teal, glowing like it carried its own light. The murals lifted from the concrete and floated, petals bobbing on the surface. She waded in, chest-deep, the cold biting through her skin. The flowers brushed against her, soft as velvet, fragrant with desert air. When she tried to swim for the shore, the roots tangled. Painted vines wrapped her wrists, her ankles, pulled her deeper. The teal water filled her mouth, humming like electricity. The flowers opened their throats and spoke, not words, not language, but the voices of the riverbed.

“You can’t take us away,” they whispered in the rasp of cigarette smoke, the laugh of a child pushing a cart, the low groan of a man coughing blood.

Tia jolted awake with paint on her fingertips, though she hadn’t touched a can.

The next morning, people from the encampment found her.

“You should do it,” the

beanie man told her.

“Show them we’re here.”

The tattoo-faced woman

said,

“Make them choke on it,

girl.”

They pushed her forward

like a boxer stepping into

the ring.

Tia kept quiet, but inside she was split down the middle. Half hunger: food she couldn’t afford, a mattress not eaten by mildew, a door she could lock. Half spite: the desire to throw her flowers like knives into the glass towers of downtown. When the collector returned with papers, she signed. The can in her hand rattled like bones.

That night the card stock still pressed into her palm, weighty as a gravestone. Tia curled up in her tent, the ink of her signature burning in her chest like it had been written on skin instead of paper.

Sleep came jagged.

She was back in the riverbed, only this time the walls had no murals. Blank concrete stretched miles, sterile and smooth. Her hands shook as she reached for a can, but nothing came out—no hiss, no color, just silence. Then the teal water rose again. Slow at first, then faster, until it poured from cracks in the walls, gushing like veins split open. The riverbed filled until she floated, the current dragging her down its endless gray corridor.

The flowers bloomed under the surface. Not hers—perfect, digital imitations, their edges too clean, their petals symmetrical like stock photos. They opened wide, mouths of paint, and inside each one were eyes. Dozens, blinking, unblinking. All trained on her. She thrashed, but the water thickened, viscous like paint poured from a bucket. It filled her lungs. She tried to scream and the sound came out in spray-can hisses, neon teal letters curling in the current before dissolving into nothing.

The eyes spoke, layered voices vibrating through the water:

We do not belong on walls.

We do not belong in glass.

You have traded our roots

for mirrors.

She sank. The teal darkened to black. The last thing she saw was her own flower, her prickly pear, drifting above her with its petals folding shut. A coffin lid.

Tia woke gasping, chest damp, as if the riverbed had poured straight through her. She tasted metal in her mouth. When she spat, a fleck of teal paint gleamed in her saliva.

Downtown buzzed with light, the towers like teeth biting into the smog. Tia had never walked into a gallery before. Her art had always lived under bridges, on concrete skin, bleeding in the rain. But here it was—her flowers, framed in glass and spotlight, standing like pinned butterflies.

The white cube smelled of champagne and disinfectant. Guests floated in silk and gold chains, their laughter sharp as broken glass. Cameras flashed. A DJ whispered ambient beats, like the hum of freeway traffic slowed down.

Her flowers looked wrong. The collectors hadn’t moved them whole. Some had been cut in slabs from the riverbed walls, jagged edges smoothed down, concrete cleaned until it gleamed. Others weren’t hers at all—replicas, perfectly repainted, too symmetrical, the spray-can grit buffed out until the petals looked plastic.

Tia pressed her hands to her jeans, paint flakes rubbing into her skin. She wanted to scream that they’d stolen the soul out of them, but the crowd only cooed.

“So aesthetic,” said a girl in

sequins, pouting for a selfie

with the prickly pear

behind her.

“TikTok’s gonna eat this up,”

said a boy in velvet, flashing

teeth at his reflection in the

glass.

Nobody saw the initials tucked into the petals, the tiny memorials she’d carved—K.B., Dougie, Angel—friends who had gone under, swept away by fentanyl, cops, cold nights. Nobody saw the ashes mixed into her paint, the prayers whispered while the cans hissed.

And then, the walls began to breathe.

At first it was subtle—the petals twitching under the spotlights. But then the flowers started curling inward, suffocating themselves. Paint dripped thick and dark, pooling on the polished floor. The gallery-goers didn’t notice. They just posed, their shadows staining the walls.

In the glass, Tia saw something else.

Behind the reflections of champagne flutes and sequined dresses, the riverbed appeared. Ghostly tents flickered in the panes, shopping carts rusted and skeletal. The people she painted for stood there in silence, watching through the glass as if from another world. Their faces were blurred, but their eyes were sharp, hungry.

A woman lifted her hand from behind the glass. Tia recognized her, the tattooed woman, the one who smoked and smiled while watching her paint. The woman mouthed something: You left us.

Tia staggered back. The gallery lights burned too bright, searing her eyes, and suddenly the floor tilted like a freeway overpass mid-quake. Her head filled with spray-can hissing, with pigeons calling her name.

Ti-a.

Ti-a.

Ti-a.

The guests kept sipping, snapping, scrolling. Nobody noticed the walls bleeding paint, the ghosts pressing their palms to the glass. Nobody noticed Tia’s breath coming fast and ragged, the teal glow dripping from her fingertips. She wanted to claw her flowers free, drag them back to the river where they belonged. Instead, she stumbled out into the Los Angeles night, the gallery’s neon sign buzzing behind her like a severed nerve.

The gallery’s white cube still buzzed in her skull as Tia stumbled onto the bus, clutching the rail like a lifeline. The driver didn’t look at her. No one did. She dropped into a cracked plastic seat, heart thundering in her ears.

The bus lurched forward. At first, it was just Los Angeles rolling past—skyscrapers polished to glass knives, billboards screaming miracles in LED.

But then the city began to

splinter.

Every stop was a different

world.

In Beverly Hills, gold dripped from the palm trees. Shoppers in sunglasses shuffled past carrying bags that leaked diamonds onto the sidewalk. They didn’t notice the blood seeping from the cracks in the pavement, thin lines snaking toward the bus.

In Koreatown, neon signs flickered too fast, too bright, each character bending into letters she couldn’t read. Whole towers leaned toward her window, their lights blinking like Morse code. The smell of fried garlic and spilled beer twisted into burnt paint, acrid and sweet.

Then skid row—rows of tents and makeshift shelters stretching like scars, lit by the sick yellow of streetlamps. But the people weren’t moving. They stood frozen, mannequins wrapped in tarp, faces blank, mouths sewn shut with string. Their eyes rolled toward her as the bus passed.

Tia pressed her forehead to the glass. The reflection staring back wasn’t hers. It was the prickly pear she painted, its petals folded tight, glaring. Behind it, the tattooed woman again, lips moving slow: You left us.

Her chest squeezed. She couldn’t breathe. The pigeons were on the bus now, perched along the aisle poles, heads twitching, eyes like coins. They opened their throats and the bus filled with her name.

Tia.

Tia.

Tia.

Spray-can hisses layered

over the syllables.

She tried to get off, but the doors wouldn’t open. The bus roared forward faster and faster, lights streaking into ribbons outside. Each stop bled into the next until the city collapsed into a single blur—luxury towers, neon markets, tent rows—stacked on top of each other like bad graffiti tags.

Then the bus screeched, brakes screaming. The doors yawned open.

The Santa Ana Riverbed.

She staggered down the steps, knees buckling. The walls stretched out in both directions, infinite gray. No flowers. No color. Just blank concrete skin. Her spray can rattled weak in her hand, but the sound was drowned out by silence so loud it shook her teeth. The riverbed pulsed once, like a heartbeat, then stilled.

The riverbed was bare. The walls where she had coaxed blooms from gray were scrubbed clean, sterilized, whitewashed like the gallery. Her chest ached as if the paint had been torn from her ribs along with the murals. She crouched low, pressing her palm to the concrete, waiting for some trace of warmth, but it was cold. Lifeless.

The pigeons scattered. Their wings slapped once, twice, then the sky was empty. For a long time she just sat there, head in her hands, listening to the freeway thunder overhead. The city moved on without her. The flowers were gone. And yet, the hiss of a spray can wouldn’t leave her ears. A phantom sound, insistent, like her blood had become aerosol. She lifted the can in her hand—it was empty, but when she shook it, it rattled, heavy.

The riverbed faded from around her.

The walls stretched taller,

taller, until they weren’t

walls at all but windows.

She blinked, and she was

back downtown, standing

outside the gallery.

The white cube glowed

sterile against the night.

Inside, she could see people

still drifting between the

flowers, sipping, snapping,

posing.

The world that had stolen

hers.

Tia lifted the can. It hissed alive, teal bursting from the nozzle, brighter than any spotlight. She dragged the color across the gallery glass in one violent stroke, then another, then another. Petals flared open, thorns cutting jagged, leaves reaching for the sky. A flower bloomed where no one wanted it—raw, uneven, breathing.

The paint dripped, running down the pristine glass like blood. Inside, the guests turned, startled, faces twisted in confusion and disgust. Some raised their phones. Some backed away. None of them understood. Tia kept going, the can rattling like a heart. She sprayed until the hiss ran dry, until her arm ached, until the flower towered over her, alive in a way the gallery could never contain. She stepped back, chest heaving.

On the other side of the glass, her reflection stared back—not her face, but the flower, wide open, petals shaking with breath. For a heartbeat, she thought she saw the tattooed woman behind it, smiling slow, cigarette smoke curling from her mouth.

Tia dropped the can. It clattered against the pavement, empty, but the bloom stayed, pressed defiantly against the glass, impossible to own, impossible to move.

For the first time that night,

she felt something other

than hollow.

It wasn’t success.

It wasn’t failure.

It was hers.

DEDICATION

For Tia—

the most amazing,

insufferable, defiant artist I know.

The only woman who ever loved me by grinding days into paint, covering a whole wall with flowers until concrete turned soft beneath her hands. You drove me out of my mind and still, you carved beauty where there should have been nothing but blank gray. That was your love language: loud, relentless, unforgettable.

This story is yours, as much as it’s mine—your stubborn petals, your impossible colors, your refusal to let anyone forget.