It was an especially Ohio December Monday early afternoon with skies an even coating of fifty percent neutral grey, with bramblish tree limbs reaching plaintively upward with their fingers curled and the gorse and thistle a demure green below them. The grass even had a little life left in it.

Anthony Lidon was walking down the sidewalk, navigating between brackish puddles and sporadic trash, eyes keenly focused on his path and hands firmly jammed into coat pockets. With his headphones underneath a woolen cap blocking out the sounds of passing cars, he kept himself in his own factitious world.

What he didn’t know, and what later he wish he had known so that he could have avoided the whole nasty business altogether, was that at the terminus of his walk lay the pivot about which his entire existence up until that point would be made a minor footnote in his life and which preceded blandly before the opening up of his entire grand destiny.

This terminus was, of course, the gas station; He desperately needed some candy or chips and maybe a soda.