One Town.

This short story was entered into a competition where I had 48 hours to write a 500 word story.

The worker polished the shiny, silver light of his delivery bike. A ritual. It was the only thing that shone in his world, and one day it would guide him to a better place.

A convenience store in a place called One. One store, one road, and one house with one person behind its one door.

The worker looks at the telephone on the wall, next to canned provisions stacked in pyramids on dusty shelves.

He leans his delivery bike against the counter and shifts his gaze from the telephone to the road outside, running without bend or rise through the forest to the one house. He looks back at the telephone. It rings.

"I want one can, paper and more ink." The voice is cold, a man's, old and uncaring.

"A can of what? More paper and ink? What are you doing with all that paper and ink?"

"Dinner, bring me dinner. You still wearing those wedding shoes, boy?" A dirty snigger and the line goes dead.

The worker remembers his wedding, his marriage and his wife, as if they are three distinct individuals, and their journey from placid waters to turbulence and his path from love to loneliness. He looks at his shoes.

It's a quarter past three in the afternoon and it's dark on the road, where under the knuckles of knotted trees only cold and rain reach the rutted surface that kicks at the reluctant rider. He remembers the day she left, her look of bitterness and wanting and her accusation that he killed love with duty before she walked up the one road and defiantly into the pathless forest. 

He missed her. It had been 17 years and still he wanted the placid waters. Still he wore those shoes, now blistered with age and sodden from the puddles on the road.

At the one house he does as always. Resting his bicycle against a rotting tree, he shines its light on the scratched and weather-worn door that stands ajar. Trembling and ink-stained hands protrude, seeking.

"Give me the delivery." The slender and withered fingers hook the provisions and yet continue to search until cold and greasy fingertips touch the worker's hand.

"Keep your rotten soul inside," he bites, watching the hands withdraw.

A muffled laugh. "She used to visit me here. Before she ran. Before you lost her."

His delivery was done. His duty finished, like an act of monogamy for a person he despised. 

The worker stands in the bicycle's light, turning away from the one house. "This light will guide me away," he says through tears and rain and he rides away from the one house, away from the one person, away from the creek where hundreds of letters from his love lay rotting and unopened. Unseen.

He rides and promises never to return, his conviction, the building storm and the sweet and pungent smell of wild violets and elder masking his senses, making the shrill, piercing scream of another person go unheard.