I pictured the other men from the arcade like satellites cut loose in space with nothing to orbit. There was no chance I’d see the Marine again, or the bull, or the hedgehog, or the guy who said I should read The Better Angels of Our Nature. I wished I could phone some of the other men who went there in order to gauge the appropriate response. Maybe they had received news of the arcade’s closing with a shrug.
Even after seeing it all emptied out and vacated, I drove out there one last time a couple of weeks later, just to be sure. In my fantasies, they’d had to close the place down and remove the inventory for some kind of temporary mold or asbestos remediation, after which it would reopen exactly the same as before.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DREW NELLINS SMITH grew up in a small town in Texas and wrote Arcade while working at a motel in Austin. He has written, reviewed, and interviewed for many of the usual literary places.