Aguilar

A smooth and soft skinned pale old man worked behind the counter dressed oddly formal for his role., He had greeted the children as if he had waited all day to see them. “Good to see you all this afternoon! I suppose you might want to go down that back isle and pick yourselves out one of our locally made brownies or imported saltwater taffy!” He laughed and then winked. With that, the children shuffled to the back isle, passing the bread and pasta, and finding the shelves with the sweet stuff. The back of the store had chained off the staircase with strangely spaced steps. Each plank looked as if it had just barely been thrown down with gaps destined to swallow loose change. The tile just at the very back underfoot was brown and scuffed from the rubber of wheeled carts and cheap sneakers. The shelves were wooden instead of the usual metal the children were accustomed to at their home stores. After each child made their selections, they shuffled to the counter to pay and then one by one went back out into the daylight with an angelic ring of the door.

Instead of going back down the road passed the pub and around the corner back to their lodgings, they decided to go around in a big loop straight down away from the store. There were small, old buildings lining this road which stood parallel to Aunt Minnie’s. The buildings were bars, barbers, or repair shops instead of houses. Many of the buildings that once were a business appeared to have shut down and been abandoned. The boarded windows covered in graffiti and the signs were destroyed or half ripped. At the far corner, there was an old bank that had met this cursed fate of failure. The two steps up to the door in chains were crumbling and exposed. Half the cement had cracked off and sunk along with a hole just big enough to look through. Curiosity caught Axel’s attention and he shoved his face down into the hole to try to get a good look. “Whoa!” he cried out. The hole was a portal exposing a deep drop into the basement of the building, faintly illuminated by the natural lighting. Each child took their turn to look in, gasping at the sight.

“When we are grown up, we should come back here and look for gold. I bet you everyone has been too afraid to go into this haunted bank and get the treasures waiting in the vault.” Baxter whispered. He was the eldest of the group and the bravest, obviously. He had dark hair and a pale, freckled complexion. His eyes grew intense as he spoke, and near obsessively he could not stop sneaking peaks down into the abyss.