Most of Pittman Forge was closed and dark, with only a scattering of street lights working. Even Annie’s was dark, though it was only a little after 8 p.m. He wandered into the center of town and was attracted to the glow and noise that emanated from the small Piggly Wiggly supermarket, still open, its parking lot half-full of people and cars. Standing at the edge of the light he saw that there were two separate groups: a few adults holding fat brown grocery bags doing their shopping, entering and exiting slowly from the store; and a small crowd of younger people collected at the far edge of the lot because there was nowhere else to go. The young crowd was centered on a trio of two men and a teenaged girl; the men wearing camouflage jackets and jeans and combat boots, the girl in a black tube top and bare feet. He could hear a few words of their conversation but not enough to follow it; at one point the woman began to laugh, a loud scream with her head thrown back, and she staggered about— whether from drunkenness or hilarity he couldn’t tell— slapping both camouflaged men on their shoulders. The rest of the teenagers became more animated at this performance…

The reporter was unexpectedly stung by a depressing sense of fatalism. All of the participants—the shoppers and the partiers—appeared trapped to him. Their choreographed routine seemed so inculcated by the town and the mountains that, even had they escaped from this monotony to the cities, they would have had to return, for they could never fit in anywhere else. Burdened with this melancholy, he left the lights and walked into the deeper darkness of the residential area, where dim forms could be sensed on the porches and occasional lights filtered through curtains in front windows. He walked until the sidewalk disappeared and then turned around; on the journey back, someone across the unlit street murmured ‘hello’. Surprised, he nodded in return. The Piggly Wiggly parking lot was empty when he passed it again.