The Old Corner Store

Writing Challenge: March 13, 2017

Prompt: Where that place used to be. Write about a place you used to go when you were younger that is no longer there, or is something else now.

We were poor and rarely had any spending money, but when a few dollars did come our way our little 10-year-old selves would half a block to the old gas station everyone called “the corner store.” It wasn’t in a prime location; it was a poor, out of the way neighborhood after all, so years after the pumps stopped selling gas the building still existed to cater to kids and teens looking for snacks and down trodden adults buying cartons of cigarettes and cheap beer. It was an unremarkable place, but it was one of the highlights of a poor kid’s existence to spend a dollar on a soda or candy bar. That old place was still there when we left in 2006, but I hear it’s been torn down; the recession hit unfairly hard in poor neighborhoods. That life feels like it belonged to another person, yet I know it was me. I remember the asphalt under my warn out tennis shoes, clutching a few spare coins in my pocket, as my sister and I crossed the road to that grungy-white, boxy, concrete building on the corner.