Two Worlds

 

Not sure if it fits the Buried prompt at Writingthe200, but here goes:

Behind the picket fenced clapboard houses, whitewashed and scrubbed shiny clean, lie the bowels that drive the community, the types of enterprises not depicted in advertisements. Check cashers share space with laundromats and unlicensed healers. In a darkened corner lay eight beds, occupied with night workers, resting between shifts of performing necessary tasks our society doesn’t want to acknowledge.

The key he sent in the mail fits into an unmarked door, leads into a long narrow space outfitted with cabinets and a mattress dressed in the traitors flag of a lost war. The one fixed window overlooks a weed covered empty parking lot and defunct factory. Below the window is a sliding mechanism one would expect for exchanging goods in a carry out eatery. No evidence of cooking exists, only stacks of mismatched empty luggage blocking a heavy back door.

A sense of foreboding weighs down, that someone like me, from the main street a short walk away should have never ventured so far from home, should have never questioned how he could have afforded to gift me such a fine abode.

Fingering the threadbare flag, I imagine it wrapped around his body, standing tall on a mountain far away.