Tom looked down the street and was astonished to find that the new store was already open.  It had only been a week since they broke ground--now it was open, operating, a line around the block.  It was the perfection of simplicity, square, white, a simple sign that simply read “The Store."  Even the customers seemed to conform to its plainness: one line of downtrodden customers shuffling in, one line of happy customers flowing out.

He checked his watch.  No time to browse--he had to make it to the bridge.  As he passed The Store, he felt his need to enter a bit more intensely than usual.  Perhaps because one was in his neighborhood now, or because he’d already been in them once too often.  But, dependant or not, his first priority was the bridge.

The bridge was about the only place he felt normal, or safe.  He was quite familiar with it, and with the people that frequented it.  Six times a day for six hours a day he was there.  Most people spent about the same amount of time; some more, some less.  The new people usually spent more time, looking for things they'd lost on the way to town.  Sometimes they’d find odds and ends, but they never found everything.

I reside in a shack on the haunted plains of Kansas with a hissing cat, a dog that bites people, and a ferret that I can not see. I've had works published in Twisted Tongue magazine, and on the web with Writing Shift, Whispers of Wickedness, and East of the Web. I mostly write when the mood strikes me, but the ferret demands that I write at night.