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nose,
I realized my mistake.
    "...Outside?"
    "Oh!" she blinked.
    Without another embarrassing
word, down the stairs we went, two steps at a time. In the apartment hallway,
all the lights were either out or flickering. Danni swung the door leading
outside open, letting hazy light into the dusty space. I took a deep breath of
the beautiful, polluted air of a small city. The sky was a chalky gray, and
proved to be an interesting background to the dozens of humble, crumbling shops
on the street, only to be overshadowed by goliath business buildings even
further on down. The arcade, the meat shop, t-
    "C'mon, I thought you
said you were gonna DO something outside!" She
pleaded. I rolled my eyes with exaggeration, and followed along.
    "Stop rushing me!"
I defended myself.
    "Better keep me
entertained!" she snapped playfully.
    "Why's that?"
    "Because I'm the only
one who wants to spend time with you, emo boy."
she ruffled my hair.
    I rolled my eyes a second
time and let her go on ahead of me. Even though I was far behind her, I could
just tell from her body language that she was scanning the small town square we
were now in, looking for anything that would keep the attention of someone who
was as impatient as she was.
    As we casually proceeded
down the street with little deliberation, one site caught our eye, and then
jolted our senses: Shakespeare’s was shutting down!
    Shakespeare’s was an ancient
book shop that was established here way back in the
1930s, when our Burybury was but a budding town. The
family that had owned the shop ever since its inception took advantage of the
lucrative name they just so happened to share with the renowned playwright,
only further attracting attention to their little store. It’s quaint, wooden
structure always was quite a contrast to the dull bleakness of the gray
surrounding it. Of course, this dreariness hadn’t always existed around it, but
sprung up with the fall of old shops and the rise of new. There it stood
though, proud and fearless of the advance of time.
    Unfortunately, all of its
folk-like charm was gone. Closing signs were plastered on every window, every
bevel, every edge, until it looked like one giant closing sign that happened to
have a wooden door.
    Danni and I let out a
collective sigh of disappointment; the very same kind that one breathes when
you see something that you’ve always taken for granted taken away. We hadn’t
visited the shop too often, and obviously enough, we were feeling a little
guilty of this now.
    I was the first to reach
forward and turn the door knob, always carefully, as I never knew when it would
fall off in my hand.
    Inside, the shop was dusty
and decrepit, spider webs lining the ceiling. They were the kind that came with
age rather than neglect, specifically in a small store which saw decades,
centuries, millennia of knowledge resting comfortably upon the shelves.
    At the front of the shop was
an old man sitting at a mahogany desk, scrawling away at a few documents. His
white hair retreated to the back of his head, showing his many age spots. He
wore the very same old-fashioned, dusty brown attire that Danni and I had seen him
wear on a consistent basis; it became a trademark of sorts.
     Though he looked like
he was old enough to be the founder of the shop some 110 years ago, his wit and
physical abilities were retained. He had a quick eye, acute hearing, and a mind
sharper than a butcher’s knife. However, his hands couldn’t quite keep still
when he wrote, seemingly the only thing that the onslaught of years had against
him; between his family name and trembling tendency, he had earned the nickname
of…
    “Shakes!” I called from the
back of the store. He looked up, and gave a quivering motion for us to go see
him.
    “What’re you doing? You’re
shutting down?” Danni asked with concern, saving any form of greeting for
later.
    He looked up at us with
depressed eyes, empty of any glimmer, his joy robbed by a nameless rot.
    “Well…I