You’d be forgiven for missing them.

People usually stick to the pretty side of downtown, the side that faces out. It gets cleaned regularly, the sidewalks are swept, and the only whiff of danger is if someone drives through a crosswalk.

The other side of downtown…that’s where the steam vents belch forth, where the dumpsters live, where all the doors say STAFF ONLY or NO TRESPASSING. Loading docks and ugly bricks that haven’t been painted in decades because only the employees ever see them.

As before, you could easily be forgiven for overlooking their existence.

Here on a brick wall, there against a concrete retainer, or inscribed on old and asphalted-over manhole covers: spray-painted graffiti, in red, of a triangle inscribed within a set of three large and three small circles. A dozen, all told, each with a twin directly across from it on a line intersecting the old courthouse.

No one saw them arrive; no paint-spattered malcontents slinking away in the dark. They simply arrived, and defied the few futile attempts to clean them made by the idle truck driver or smoke-breaking clerk.

You’d be forgiven for missing them. But soon their purpose will be clear to all, and then you’ll wonder–perhaps as your last conscious thought–how you could have been so blind.

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