Candy And Cigars

In a small town in Brooklyn, near the Upper West side there was a boy I noticed fairly often lurking near the family run store that I got my morning decaf coffee from, him and his friends would come in every morning and not buy a single thing it seemed kind of odd at first, but days later I noticed them smuggling candy bars and cigarettes inside their sweatshirts and jackets and leaving. 

In towns like this, I wasn't surprised that this had happened but the fact that him and his friends and had the nerve to steal every single day made my blood boil. Soon, it had become so obvious I wondered how the workers hadn't noticed, I was close to calling the police until one day, I had came in a few minutes late of my regular schedule and saw the boys had taken their daily ransack of cigars and Butterfingers and left but just as I was about to ring up my order, the boy had came back with a few dollars, enough to pay for what they had took today.

He hands it over to the man at the cash register and apologizes, before he leaves I can't help  but ask him what he had just done, and he replies, "I may be an awful person by stealing these things, but everyday after my friends leave, I come back and pay for the things they took only because-" He pauses, taking a deep breath and then continues.

"I can't bear to see the shop going out of business because of our greed."

In a small town in Brooklyn, near the Upper West side there was a boy I noticed fairly often lurking near the family run bakery that I got my morning decaf coffee from, he usually never ordered a thing. Mainly, just eyed the smudgy glass counter with his brown eyes that were drowned in a feeling I couldn't quite put my tongue on, I assumed it was greed, from staring at all the delicacies that he never bought. Some days, I would even go to the bakery, just to watch what he'd do after a while but he just sat there and from time to time he got up to throw away something or a crumpled piece of paper and then eventually towards the end of the day, he would leave.

Months later, I see him on the streets walking, with a girl wrapped around his shoulders, smiling as if they had just won the lottery. I couldn't help but walk up to him and ask what he had stared at in the bakery for all those weeks and he replies with, "Every day, I