Nameless

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IT IS A natural human urge to settle in certain formations, which can be repeated in a village of six hundred even more easily than a city of five million. The village is merely the city stripped to its basic component parts, after all: places to gather, places to buy and sell, places to live, places to play. The church, the shops, the houses, the park. Low Ferry's major road was a two-lane blacktop lined with storefronts, the only reliably-plowed street in the winter. During the summer the cheap asphalt sometimes melted and stuck to people's shoes. My bookstore, and my little apartment above it, stood midway down the road in the heart of our bustling retail district: Dusk Books, the hardware store, the cafe, a general-goods store with a grocer's built into one side of it, and two antique stores that only opened for the tourist season. There were a few old boarded-up buildings to the south, as well, evidence that some folks had gone bust and moved on and nobody new was filling their place. We had a school and a church at the north end of the street, and most people seemed to feel we didn't need much more.

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