November 8th, 2007
Graveyard
I hate working graveyard at the pawn shop. It depresses me, the druggies scraping for another hit, the gangfights and the accidents. I don’t hear them anymore, only the ambulances.
One went by, few nights back. It was raining. A kid came in ten minutes later, soaked and depressed. “What happened out there?” I asked.
“Drunk,” he explained, setting down a battered ring box. “Can’t keep this.”
It was an engagement ring, brand-new. “Two hundred,” I offered. He looked worse. “Two-fifty.”
He took the money, numbly.
“Get turned down?”
He broke down and cried. “Never got to ask…”
P.S.: I’m an Opera user. Back when I wrote Graveyard, that meant that I used an ad-supported browser and got keyword-filtered GoogleAds with most websites I visited. Of course, one day I was working on the old site and noticed that Google had looked at my story and assigned it The Worst Google Ads Ever.
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