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Baby World, 2067 Maple Court, Poplar Bluff, MO (2025)

08/23/2025

I was born in a barn with no electricity — and now I video call my grandkids from a phone I carry in my pocket.

My name’s Earl. I’m 75 years old, a farmer all my life, and sometimes I think our generation grew up with one boot in the dirt and the other stepping into outer space.

When I was a boy, we milked cows by hand before the sun came up. The barn smelled of hay and sweat, and your only music was the creak of a wooden beam or the rooster outside. If the tractor broke down, you fixed it with baling wire and prayer. Groceries came from the garden. Supper meant everyone at the same table, no excuses.

We measured time in seasons, not in seconds. We waited for the rain, for the wheat to ripen, for letters to arrive from cousins states away. Patience wasn’t a lesson — it was life.

Then the world sped up. Tractors got GPS, seeds came from labs, and neighbors started waving from trucks instead of walking across the field. The radio gave way to the television, the television gave way to the computer, and now I hold a screen smaller than my hand that can tell me the weather, the market price of corn, or what my grandson ate for breakfast a thousand miles away.

I’ve sold hogs at auction and I’ve clicked “enter” to sell soybeans online. I’ve used a scythe and I’ve flown a drone over my fields. I’ve watched the mailbox sit empty because no one sends letters anymore, and I’ve felt my phone buzz with ten messages before I finish my morning coffee.

Some people think old farmers like me are behind the times. But let me tell you something: we’ve lived in both worlds. We can sharpen a plow blade and troubleshoot Wi-Fi. We can tell you when the soil is ready by the smell of it, and we can double-check the forecast with a weather app.

We know the worth of slow — of watching a calf take its first breath or waiting months for corn to turn golden. And we know the power of fast — of sharing a picture of that same field with family across the country in an instant.

Maybe that’s our real gift. We are the memory keepers of the slow world and the proof that you can still learn in the fast one. We can teach the young that not everything worth having comes instantly… and remind the old that trying something new won’t kill you.

I am a farmer, but more than that, I am a bridge. A bridge between sweat-stained overalls and satellite signals. Between dirt roads and digital maps. Between what was and what will be.

And if my story proves anything, it’s this: you can live with your roots in the soil and your hands on the future — and still be 100% yourself.

08/22/2025

The first thing I told those kids was that I’d seen a man fall because of me — before I ever kissed a girl.

Whole classroom went quiet. Not the stunned kind of quiet, but the kind where even the pencils stop scratching.

I’m seventy-five. My knees sound like Rice Krispies when I sit, and my voice ain’t got the thunder it used to — but that day, in my grandson’s high school classroom, I saw something in those teenagers' faces I hadn’t seen in a long damn time.

Respect. Maybe curiosity. Maybe both.

The teacher had invited me to talk for “Career Exploration Week,” whatever the hell that means. Said I could share what it meant to serve — to wear the uniform. My grandson Tommy said they usually bring in a dentist or a drone engineer. Nobody ever brings in someone with shrapnel still in their shoulder.

So there I was, pressed into an old Army jacket that hadn’t fit right since ‘89, standing under a flickering fluorescent light with a lump in my throat the size of a C-ration can.

I didn’t prepare notes. War doesn’t need cue cards.

I told them about boot camp in ‘66 — how they shaved our heads so we all looked the same, scared and stubborn. How the Georgia sun peeled skin from your neck, and the drill sergeant peeled everything else from your soul. I told them about the flight to Da Nang, the smell of hot oil and gun grease, and how the first time I saw a man die, he didn’t scream — he just made this soft sound, like a tire losing air.

I didn’t get graphic. But I didn’t lie.

Then I told them what mattered most.

That I didn’t go to war for politics. I went because I believed in the kid beside me. Because we’d promised each other we’d get home — even if only one of us could.

I told them about Davis. Real name Reggie Davis from Akron, Ohio. Played high school ball, could’ve gone pro. But he joined up because his little brother needed braces and his mom worked two jobs. He took a bullet meant for me. Just like that — one morning he was laughing about my awful handwriting, and by afternoon I was cleaning his blood off my boots.

One of the girls near the back wiped her eyes.

Then I switched gears. I told them about coming home.

About how no one clapped at the airport. How I got called a baby-killer in San Diego. How my dad met me at the bus stop and said, “Well, you’re alive,” like that was the whole damn parade.

I told them I drank too much. Slept too little. That I didn’t sleep indoors for the first two months back, because the silence felt more dangerous than jungle noise.

But I also told them this:

The Army didn’t just teach me how to shoot. It taught me how to show up. How to carry my load and someone else’s if they were limping. How to lead when no one else wants to, and follow when someone better is ahead. I learned grit. I learned humility. I learned that life isn’t fair — and you don’t get to quit just because it isn’t.

Some boy with a hoodie and earbuds asked, “Would you do it again?”

And I said yes. Not because I liked it. Not because I think war is noble. But because I became a man out there. A flawed one, sure. But one who knew what it meant to bleed for something besides himself.

The bell rang, but nobody moved. The teacher had to remind them to grab their stuff.

As they shuffled out, one kid slipped me a folded-up note. No name. Just five words, written in pencil:

“Thank you. I needed that.”

That night, Tommy hugged me harder than he had since he was six. Said the class wouldn’t stop talking about me. That even the jaded ones stayed quiet for once.

I sat on the porch afterward, the fall air sharp in my lungs, and watched a possum scurry across the yard.

For years, I didn’t talk about the war. Thought no one wanted to hear it. Thought it’d make people look at me like I was broken.

But maybe — just maybe — this country’s finally ready to listen.

And God knows, some of these kids are starving for truth that doesn’t come from a screen.

Because some stories don’t need hashtags. They just need someone brave enough to tell them. And someone even braver to finally listen.

08/22/2025

On a cracked porch in a forgotten neighborhood, one man brought a bottle of cheap pills that carried something far greater — a debt of kindness being quietly repaid. What happened next would ripple through an entire community.

The morning the world changed, it didn’t look like much.

The sun was mean and bright, bouncing off the hood of every parked car. I was sitting on that warped green bus bench at 12th and Carter, rubbing the callus on my thumb, counting the hours until my next paycheck — and wondering how the hell I was gonna get my sister’s inhaler before her wheezing got worse.

You ever try not to think about something and end up thinking about nothing else? That was me. I had twenty-three bucks to my name and the inhaler was fifty-eight. Numbers feel heavier when they’re tied to someone’s breath.

That’s when the old man sat down beside me.

He wore a threadbare brown jacket, sleeves shiny from years of elbows. His hands were big — not the soft kind you see in commercials, but rope-veined, nicked, and bent like they’d been holding wrenches since Truman was president. He looked like a man who’d seen more winters than he cared to count.

“Hot day,” he said.

I nodded. Didn’t have energy for small talk.

Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled fifty. “Here,” he said, like it was nothing.

I stared at it. “I… I can’t take this.”

“You can.” He shoved it into my hand. “And you will.”

That bill felt like it might burn through my skin. “Why?”

He looked out toward the cracked asphalt road. “Because once, a man did it for me. That’s all you need to know.”

We didn’t talk after that. His bus came, mine didn’t. He got up slow, knees stiff, and climbed on without looking back.

At the pharmacy, Maria — the tech who’s been there since my mom was alive — scanned the inhaler and asked where I found the extra cash. I told her about Walter, the old man on the bench.

Her eyebrows pulled together. “Walter Briggs?”

I shrugged. “Don’t know his last name.”

She leaned over the counter. “If that’s Walter, he can’t even afford his own heart pills.”

That sat in my chest like a stone. I asked her what he took. She told me the brand. It was seventy-nine bucks, but the generic was nineteen. I bought that instead, along with the inhaler.

Then I walked five blocks to the address Maria gave me.

Walter’s place was a squat little house with peeling paint the color of old teeth. He answered the door in a white undershirt, surprised to see me. I held up the pills.

“You needed these more than I needed the fifty,” I said.

He didn’t argue. Didn’t thank me, either. Just smiled like he knew something I didn’t, and said, “Come in. There’s coffee.”

We sat in his kitchen, a square room that smelled like yesterday’s bacon and a hundred mornings before that. The counter was crowded with chipped mugs, a tin of sugar, a jar of instant coffee. I asked him why he gave me the money. He told me about 1962, about losing his job at the mill, about a stranger who slipped a twenty into his lunch pail so his kids could eat.

“Debt like that,” Walter said, “you don’t pay back. You pass it on.”

The thing about Walter was — he didn’t talk about kindness like it was some saintly act. He talked about it like a wrench you kept in the toolbox. Something practical. Something that could fix things.

A week later, I saw him again, this time on the corner outside the laundromat. He was giving half a bag of groceries to Mrs. Rodriguez from down the street. She’s eighty-four and still hangs her clothes on a line because the dryer eats too much electricity.

Walter caught me watching and just tipped his chin like, your turn.

So I started. Small things. Paid for the kid’s sandwich behind me at the deli. Gave my spare umbrella to the guy at the bus stop when the sky opened up. Sat with old Mr. Hanley from 4B while he waited for the ambulance after he fell.

Thing is, people noticed.

Mrs. Rodriguez started leaving extra tomatoes from her garden on my stoop. Hanley’s niece offered to fix my busted porch light. The kid from the deli brought me a bag of rolls “by accident.” Maria at the pharmacy waved the co-pay for my sister’s meds once.

It wasn’t a movement. No hashtags, no flyers. Just… neighbors. Remembering.

One evening, I walked past Walter’s place and saw him sitting on the porch, looking out like he was watching the years roll down the street. I told him what was happening — how people were helping each other now. Quiet stuff. No one keeping score.

He grinned, slow. “That’s how it works. You plant the seed, you don’t stand there yelling at it to grow. You just keep watering.”

I looked at him, at the old jacket with the shiny elbows, at the eyes that had seen too much and still looked for something worth passing on.

That night, I went home and pulled the crumpled fifty from my wallet. I’d kept it — not for the money, but because it reminded me of a day when someone’s small act made the air feel a little less heavy.

I think I know what to do with it now.

08/22/2025

The first note in my old mailbox wasn’t addressed to me.
It was addressed to “Whoever still cares.”

I found it on a Sunday, slid between two dog biscuits like it was shy. The little red flag on my back-steps mailbox was up, clinking Bentley’s brass tag in the breeze. Harvey lifted his head, did that long old-dog yawn that sounds like a creaky door, and watched me open the lid.

The paper was a torn page from a church bulletin. Blue-ink pen. Neat, careful letters like somebody practiced before writing.

Whoever still cares—
Do you know anyone who can fix a porch step? There’s a soft spot we can’t afford to fall through. We’ve already fallen through enough this year. — W.

No address. Just a drawing of a small house with three dots for ellipses and, in the corner, Maple Street. That’s two blocks over. You don’t deliver a town for twenty-six years without knowing which porch creaks and which mailbox sticks.

I looked at Harvey. He looked at me. His cloudy eye did its slow blink of agreement.

“Okay then,” I said. “Let’s see who still cares.”

I packed a hammer, a box of screws that were probably older than the kid running the Dollar General, two boards I’d been saving behind the shed, and half a thermos of yesterday’s coffee. Habit makes a man honest. I slipped the torn note into my shirt pocket like I was back on the route.

The house on Maple wasn’t hard to spot. Blue siding faded to the color of old rain. An American flag that had seen years. The porch step bowed in the middle like a sigh. A young woman—thirty, maybe—sat on the swing with an infant sleeping on her chest. A boy of six or seven was chalking race cars on the walk, his tongue out in concentration.

“Afternoon,” I said, taking off my cap like my father taught me when you step onto someone’s porch. “Name’s Roy. I got your note.”

The woman’s eyes flashed alarm first, then confusion, then the kind of relief that looks like it might break you worse than fear. That order made sense to me.

“How’d you—?”

“You put it in a mailbox that rings when the wind says please,” I said. “I used to deliver to all the boxes that didn’t.”

The boy looked up. “You a mailman?”

“Retired,” I said.

“Do you know Santa?”

“Santa and I had an understanding,” I said. “He handled December. I did hot August afternoons.”

The mother laughed once, a real sound, then put a hand over her mouth like she’d been too loud in a library. “I’m Whitney,” she said. “We just—there used to be someone who’d come by to fix things for a little cash. He moved. I didn’t know who to ask that wouldn’t make me feel like I’m asking for too much.” She stared at the step. “It’s just a board.”

“Boards are where lives break ankles,” I said, kneeling. “Where’s your toolbox?”

She brought me a cracked plastic bin with two screwdrivers and a measuring tape that saw Vegas in 1998. “Will this do?”

“It will if we let it,” I said.

For an hour, I worked. The boy brought me chalk-blue lemonade that tasted like July. The baby slept through the hammering, which made me trust his future. Whitney held boards steady when my hands got tired. Harvey lay under the lilac bush and supervised with his patient cop’s stare.

While I worked, a neighbor walked past with a small dog that had big ideas. He slowed, then stopped. “You fixing something?”

“Practicing,” I said. “On a step I don’t want the mailman to fall through.”

“You the mailman?”

“I was,” I said. “I’m trying not to stop being.”

He nodded. “I’m Rob. The lady two doors down’s got a gutter that runs like a broken fiddle when it rains.” He glanced at his feet. “You… collect anything? For your time?”

“Collection day is Sunday,” I said. “I take smiles, coffee, and the story of how you made it this far. Only one per household.”

He grinned at that. “I got a whole novel of that,” he said. “We can make you a pot of motel-strong coffee.”

By the time the step was steady, the chalk cars had a finish line, and the baby had woken to study the world that had not fallen through. Whitney went inside and came back out with a small Tupperware of brownies the color of good soil.

“These are from a church lady who keeps the world stitched together with sugar,” she said. “Take half. Please.”

“You keep half,” I said. “In case the world comes unstitched again.”

When I got home, the red flag on my back steps was up again.

Another note.

Mr. Roy—
I’m next door to the blue house. My husband’s in Michigan chasing a job and I’m here chasing two kids. The faucet screams like a ghost whenever I turn it on. If you can’t, that’s okay. I’ll learn to like the ghost.

It signed with a name I recognized from envelopes I used to sort: Janelle Evans.

I fixed that faucet on Monday. Tuesday it was a flickering porch light at a widow’s house where the screen door still had a magnet from a pizza place that closed before Facebook learned to make you angry. Wednesday it was a loose stair rail and a kid’s bike tire and a doorbell that hadn’t rung since Obama’s first term. Each one had a note in the mailbox.

They started bringing coffee. And stories. I learned whose father worked at the mill until the last day in ’03, who got laid off from the plastics plant in ’20 when the pandemic made the morning news meaner, whose husband drove for a company that doesn’t look you in the eye when it raises prices.

I put a little index card inside the mailbox: SMALL THINGS FIXED HERE. NO CHARGE. PAY BY DOING YOUR OWN SMALL THING.
Underneath I scribbled: PS—DOG BISCUITS ALWAYS INSIDE. HELP YOURSELF IF YOU’RE A GOOD BOY.

The card curled with humidity. I left it like that. This town understands curl.

Harvey came with me every time. He is the right kind of advertisement. People who don’t trust strangers trust old dogs. He would stand there, watching, then lean his head on a knee when the story got to the part where the voice goes brittle. We’re a team: I steady what shakes. He steadiers who shake.

On Friday, I took a break and drove to the diner where Jessie’s sign still leans a little wrong and the pie case turns like a miracle that believes in butter. Frank—different Frank than before, younger, but he wears the same paper hat—poured me coffee that wasn’t shy about being hot.

“You hear about the water main?” he asked.

“What about it?”

“Burst on Walnut. Elderly couple there. Can’t get downstairs to the shutoff. City crew’s on its way, but you know how it is. This town’s patience is older than its pipes.”

I was up before my legs agreed. “Harvey,” I said. He was already moving toward the door.

At the house on Walnut, there was no time to knock polite. The basement was filling. A man with a veteran’s cap on the banister looked at me with that old soldier calm that has panic hiding behind it.

“Shutoff?” I asked.

“Back wall by the furnace,” he said. “My knees are Vietnam.”

“Mine are 1974 Greenfield High football,” I said. “We’ll trade.”

The wheel was stiff. Harvey stood at the top of the stairs, ears forward, as if rooting for me on purpose. I gave the wrench everything a man my age wisely should and a little more he shouldn’t. The water stopped. The veteran sat down two steps up and let his hands shake where it was safe.

“City’s on the way,” I said, breathing like a steam engine. “You want me to hang around?”

“If it’s all the same,” he said, “I could use a man who doesn’t mind the sound of a story.”

We sat at the top of the stairs and talked about guns we never fired after 1975 and how the price of eggs will make a man invent new religions. His wife brought us dry socks. I left them a card with my number and my hours (which are the hours I’m awake).

By Sunday, my little mailbox had five thank-you notes in it, three requests, and a drawing of Harvey with a cape on. One note had a twenty-dollar bill folded inside, which I returned with a handwritten receipt that read: Paid in advance by the man who once stood still while I opened bad news. Then I tucked the twenty into the diner’s tip jar when Frank was bent over the grill.

I’m not telling you any of this to be congratulated. The world used to run on this kind of small-goods economy and we let it rust because nobody rang the bell. I am ringing it now with a brass tag and a red flag and the sound a mailbox makes when it remembers it’s a church.

A week into this, Whitney from Maple showed up at my back steps with two teenagers and a post-hole digger. “You’re not the only one with a mailbox,” she said. “We’re starting one on our porch. Same deal. Small fixes. Pay with kindness. We’ll call ours Number 2.” She handed me a flyer she’d made with clipped letters like a ransom note but sweeter: THE LITTLE FIX — MAPLE STREET. Underneath: START WHERE YOU STAND.

Rob put one up on Birch. Janelle put one up between two tomato plants. The vet on Walnut can’t kneel, but he can organize, so he made a list of who can do what—stitches, saws, rides to chemo, casseroles that don’t pretend to be healthy. The church lady with the brownies taped a little envelope to hers that said SUGAR IS A UTILITY and nobody argued.

It spread the way good news used to before everybody got good at scrolling past it. Not viral like the internet means. Viral like sourdough starter.

When the city finally took down the last of the rubble where 304 stood, a crew leader came by with a small object wrapped in a shop rag.

“Found this under the porch,” he said. “Figured it might belong to somebody who remembers what belongs to who.”

It was a skeleton key. Long, old, heavy.

I hung it next to Bentley’s tag. When the wind moves right, they knock together. The sound is not pretty. It’s honest.

A month after the first note, I opened my back-steps mailbox and found a single envelope addressed, this time, to Mr. Roy & Harvey. Inside, a Polaroid—yes, a real one, with that white border you can write on. It was the blue Maple house. The repaired step. The chalk finish line. The mother, the baby, the boy, all holding up a sign they’d made: THANK YOU FOR STILL DELIVERING.

On the bottom border, in a careful hand: P.S. We’re paying forward. Two porches done. One screen door. A freezer stuffed with meals labeled with Sharpie so even the tired can read them.

I stuck the photo on the fridge with a magnet shaped like a tiny mailbox. Then I did the old-man thing where you hold the edge of the counter and let it all wash through you without anybody watching.

At dusk, I sat on the steps with Harvey’s head on my boot. The neighborhood was loud with ordinary life—kids slapping basketballs, a radio playing “Brown Eyed Girl” like it was still new, the hiss of a grill, laughter that sounded like people weren’t embarrassed to be happy.

I touched the red flag. It chimed the brass tag. Somewhere down Maple, another little flag went up.

I thought about Miss Henley’s letter arriving three winters late, about a beagle that waited longer than he should have had to, about the way grief teaches you the map of a town better than any route book.

Then I wrote one last line on the index card in the mailbox, under the rest:

IF YOU THINK NOBODY CARES, TRY ASKING US.

ENDING
I can’t fix the price of eggs or make the years go easy, but I can carry a note across a yard. Most days, that’s the whole job of love: you lift the little flag, you answer what calls your name, and you keep delivering—until other people remember how.

08/22/2025

In the quiet shadows of a shuttered bowling alley, Ernie and his faithful dog Bingo discover a forgotten clipping in a dusty trophy case—one that could change the fate of the building, and maybe, Ernie’s life.

The key stuck in the padlock, just like it always did.
Ernie Devine jiggled it twice, then leaned his shoulder into the faded blue door until it gave with a reluctant groan. The smell met him first—lane oil, cigarette ghosts, the faint sweetness of old cola syrup gone sticky in the walls. Bingo slipped past him, nails clicking on the worn linoleum, nose already working.

It was Saturday, and they were right on time.

Lucky Strike Lanes had been closed for twelve years, but Ernie came every week like clockwork. No one stopped him. No one cared. The alley was just another dead building on the edge of Dayton, Ohio—its parking lot cracked and sprouting weeds, its sign sun-bleached to a ghost of the bright red letters it once wore.

Ernie still wore his manager’s jacket, though the stitching over the breast pocket had thinned so much you had to squint to make out his name.
ERNIE DEVINE — MANAGER.

He had been proud of that title once. Kingpin of the lanes. The man who knew every bowler’s average and every kid’s favorite pinball machine. In his hands, the place had been a living thing—always humming, always bright. Now, it was a museum no one visited.

Except him.
And Bingo.

Bingo was a wiry old mutt with a patchwork coat of tan and white, a bent left ear, and a nose for hidden things. Some folks in the neighborhood swore he had beagle in him, maybe some shepherd. Ernie figured it didn’t matter what the dog was made of—Bingo was built for company and for trouble, in equal measure.

“Go on, boy,” Ernie said, as Bingo trotted toward Lane Seven. The dog always stopped there first, sniffing the same oil-stained boards where once, in 1978, Ernie had bowled his one and only perfect game. That ball had been bright orange and heavier than it should’ve been for his shoulder, but it had rolled true. People clapped that night. Someone had bought him a beer. His wife, Louise, had kissed him in front of everyone.

That was before her illness. Before the mortgage trouble. Before the slow closing of things.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out two wrapped caramels, tossing one to Bingo, who caught it mid-air, paper and all. The dog would spit out the wrapper later, same as always. Ernie unwrapped his own slowly, the sugar sticking to his fingertips.

The sound in here was strange. No laughter, no clatter of pins—just the occasional creak of the roof settling, the echo of Bingo’s paws. Dust motes drifted through the slanted light from the grimy windows. In winter, you could see your breath in the far lanes.

Ernie walked the length of the alley, touching each lane divider with the back of his fingers. Little rituals. They kept him steady.

On the far wall, the trophy case still stood—locked, glass smudged, the brass nameplates dulled to a brownish gold. Inside, rows of bowling trophies caught the thin light. Some bore his name; others belonged to people long gone from Dayton. He had asked the last owner, before the place shut down, if he could take his own trophies home. The man had just shrugged, said the keys were lost.

Bingo stopped near the case, ears pricking. A low whine slipped from his throat.

“Not this again,” Ernie muttered. Every few weeks, the dog got fixated on that cabinet—sniffing the base, pawing the floor like something was trapped inside.

Ernie crouched, resting his hand on Bingo’s back. The fur was warm, steady. “Ain’t nothing in there but dust and brass, pal.”

Bingo disagreed, nose pressed hard to the bottom seam. His tail stiffened. Then, a sharp bark broke the stillness, bouncing off the walls like a ricochet.

The sound startled Ernie enough that he glanced over his shoulder—
and that’s when he saw movement through the front windows.

A man in a dark jacket, clipboard in hand, was crossing the parking lot. He wasn’t from the neighborhood. His stride was too brisk, his shoes too clean. Behind him, a white pickup idled, a yellow magnetic sign on the door: FAYETTE DEVELOPMENT GROUP.

Ernie’s gut tightened. Developers didn’t come around here unless they were sniffing for salvage or counting the days until demolition.

By the time the man reached the front entrance, Bingo was growling low.

“Morning,” the stranger said, pushing the door open without waiting for an invitation. The smell of cold air and aftershave followed him in.
“You the owner?”

“No,” Ernie said, standing straight, his hands tucked into his jacket pockets. “Just keeping the place from feeling lonesome.”

The man gave a dry smile. “Well, it won’t be lonesome much longer. Building’s coming down in two weeks. We’ve got permits, and—” He stopped, noticing Bingo pressed against the trophy case. “What’s with your dog?”

“Bingo minds his own business.”

“Seems like he’s minding that cabinet’s business,” the man said, stepping closer. He tapped the glass. “Old stuff?”

“History,” Ernie said, his voice flat.

The man shrugged, already moving toward the lanes. “We’ll be clearing everything before demo. If you want something, now’s the time to take it.”

Ernie watched him walk the length of the building, scribbling notes. The sound of his pen on the clipboard was too fast, too decisive.

When the man left, the air felt colder.

Bingo barked again, sharper this time, as if the moment to ignore him had passed. Ernie crouched beside him, peering through the dusty glass.

That’s when he saw it.

Not the trophies—he knew every one of those.
But at the bottom, tucked behind a row of dull brass cups, was something folded and yellow with age. Not a program or a score sheet. A newspaper clipping.

Through the dusty pane, he could just make out a black-and-white photograph. A much younger Ernie, hair slicked back, standing beside a smiling boy in a Little League cap. Behind them—rows of bowlers, Black and white together.

The headline, though faint, was still readable:
DEVINE OPENS DOORS TO ALL AT LUCKY STRIKE LANES

Ernie felt something shift in his chest. Not pride exactly. More like a ghost laying a hand on his shoulder.

Bingo whined again, and Ernie whispered, “Easy, boy.”

Because suddenly, the demolition didn’t feel inevitable.

And he knew—though he couldn’t yet explain how—that this locked case and the yellowed paper inside were about to change everything.

Part 2 – Bingo and the Bowling Alley

08/22/2025

Beneath the creaking wooden stairs of an abandoned drive-in, a thin tan dog waited under the flickering neon. Louie didn’t know her name yet—but her eyes told him she’d been waiting far longer than anyone realized.

Louie Yates never liked turning off the Starlite sign.
On summer nights, the red and blue letters had been a beacon for miles, floating above Highway 41 like a promise—cheap tickets, greasy popcorn, and a sky big enough to hold a thousand stories. But now the bulbs were half-dead, the lot was weeds, and the last movie had rolled weeks ago.

He turned the final key in the projector room and stood there for a moment, listening to the silence. It was a kind of quiet that made your chest hurt—not because it was peaceful, but because you knew what it used to sound like.

That’s when he heard it.

A low shuffle. A quick, muffled breath.

Louie stepped closer to the wall, thinking maybe one of the local kids had snuck in for a dare. The air smelled faintly of rain on dust, of oil and old wires. Then his eyes adjusted to the dark corner under the wooden stairs—and he saw her.

A dog.

She was curled tight, ribs showing under a tan coat. Her ears flicked but she didn’t move. The eyes—deep amber, wet with something older than fear—locked on his.

“Well,” Louie said softly, crouching down, “looks like you’ve made yourself at home.”

The dog didn’t blink. Didn’t growl. Just lay there, as if she’d been waiting.

Louie had been around dogs all his life. He knew the difference between a stray passing through and one with a reason to stay. This one had a reason.

The Starlite was in Jasper, Indiana—a town small enough that everyone knew who was selling their truck, who’d gotten their roof fixed, and who’d been seen buying two milkshakes at the Dairy Barn instead of one. Louie had managed the drive-in for twenty-three years. Before that, he’d done a stint in the Air Force, then ten years at the grain elevator. He’d seen the town change, the crowds thin, and the movies shrink from double features to single shows.

And now it was done. The land had been sold to a developer out of Evansville who planned to put up a storage facility.

But here was this dog, lying under the projector room like the last customer refusing to leave.

Louie eased down onto one knee, ignoring the ache in his right one from years of climbing the steel stairs. “You got a name, girl?” he asked, voice low.

A breeze pushed through the cracked siding, carrying the faint scent of clover from the empty lot. The dog lifted her head just enough for the neon light outside to catch the white streak on her muzzle. Not old age—just a marking, sharp against the tan.

“You hungry?” Louie asked.

Still, she didn’t move. But her eyes followed him as he backed away, as if memorizing his shape.

Louie came back the next night. He’d told himself it was just to check the locks before the demolition crew came in. But he had a paper sack from the diner, too—two patties, no bun.

The dog was in the same spot.

He set the bag down a few feet away and stepped back. She watched him for a long time before inching forward, paws silent on the concrete. She ate slow, chewing each bite like it mattered.

When she was done, she went right back to her place under the stairs.

By the third night, word had gotten around. Jasper had its own kind of network for stories like this—passed over the counter at the hardware store, murmured in line at the post office.

“That’s Nellie,” said Martha Kane, who’d been selling tickets at the Starlite box office since before Louie took over. She was pouring coffee at the diner when Louie came in that morning. “Belonged to a young couple years back. Came here every Friday night in the summer. Folks said they got engaged right here on the lot.”

Louie frowned. “Where’re they now?”

Martha’s smile faded. “Didn’t make it. Car wreck out on County Road 6. She was in the hospital for weeks. He didn’t…” She trailed off, stirring her coffee. “After that, the girl never came back. But Nellie—she’s been seen around here off and on ever since. Like she’s waiting.”

Louie didn’t know what to say to that.

He started leaving the projector room door unlocked.

Not because he was careless—he’d been locking those doors for decades—but because he couldn’t shake the thought of the dog sleeping under the Starlite’s bones while bulldozers circled outside.

The sign still worked, mostly. The “S” and “E” flickered, the hum of the old transformer filling the night air. It wasn’t hard to imagine Nellie lying there, lit by the glow of letters that once called out to first dates and Saturday families

One evening, Louie sat on the hood of his truck at the back of the lot, watching her. He could barely see her under the stairs, just the curve of her back and the slow rise and fall of breath. The cicadas were loud, but every so often he could hear her shift, the faint scrape of claws on concrete.

“What are you holding onto, girl?” he murmured.

She didn’t answer, of course.

But as he sat there, the air changed. It was subtle—a shift in the wind, the low rumble of a car coming down the gravel lane. Louie turned his head, half expecting a city truck or one of the kids who still came to drink in the back row.

Instead, a dark-blue minivan rolled up, slowing as it reached the locked gates.

The driver’s window slid down. A woman leaned out—her hair long, dark, threaded with gray. Two kids in the back pressed their faces to the glass, eyes wide at the looming sign.

The woman’s gaze swept over the lot like someone searching for something they’d lost a long time ago.

And under the projector room, Nellie lifted her head.

Part 2 — The Dog Who Guarded the Neon

Baby World

08/23/2025

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