Piece of Paper

 In the heart of Middle America, there was a small town called Olympus, a town of picket fences, green lawns, and friendly folks. In this town lived a beautiful young girl called Persephone. Her father, Mayor Zeus, often described her as ‘the perfect embodiment of the wholesome, all-American values Olympus stands for’, an opinion which had kept him in office for many years. Indeed, his subjects couldn’t deny the problem queen and class president’s charm, especially when she was working with her mother, Demeter’s, at local florists, where she sang her weekends away. “Watch out, Zeus she’ll be running of to L.A. one of these days. And with a sweet voice like that they’ll make her a star in no time”, Zeus’ friends at the country club would joke. “Aw no, not my Persephone,” the mayor would shake this head. “She loves this town and her Ma and Pa too much to ever wander that far.” But one weekend, on the first day of autumn, Persephone’s song was drowned by the roar of...

                 I'm currently working in a stockroom that my dad acquired. He got it for 25% of its expense from a rancher who appeared to be extremely eager to get rid of it. It is in the middle of Buddhist province, without any neighbors for a half-mile around. Watch out the window, and you will see cornfields and scraggly trees. Signal service?  Forget about it. I used to work here alone, painting and setting up the front office parcel for eventual functionality. To get to the front office, you should pass through a corridor from the main distribution center, into a secondary office, and then through another entryway into the front. I regularly hear knocks, crashes and feel air movements in the stockroom. However, I've always blamed it on the stray cats lurking in the rooftop. The main thing that has made me uneasy about the building is the way that the majority of the door locks are reversed. Whoever installed those locks...