It's gotten kind of cold and dry in the town where the coffeeshop is. Clouds close in overhead, and the old classic cars that were parked outside the brick facade have gone. Even the cinderblocks have started crumbling. Even the wire poles with the old electric lines, and even the boots slung by their laces overhead are gone. The city's gone quiet, and the city's gone to seed.
Somebody's left a pair of Crocs under a broken T-pole. The low-sodium lights have burnt out. There's some bland sorts of fast food, closed, and the sidewalks are empty out here. Even the tumbleweeds can't be damned.
There's a FOR SALE sign in the window of the coffeeshop, and only a few old, rheumy patrons left. There's some disaffected hipster with a greasy, lanky shock of hair over his eye and an infected, affected ring shoved through one ear. He's steadfastly ignoring the squabbling pair with dementia at the rickety table next to the plastic tree.
You can hear him mumbling to some earnest teenage girl over the tea tins. "Starbucks is so... CORPORATE, man. We don't use Starbucks." He pauses. There's a nasal whine. "We use FOLGERS, man. It's HARDCORE."
Out back where the garden of lavender and lilies used to be, outside over what used to be polished wood (and is now cabbage-print carpet), outside, the garden has grown over. There's more cinderblocks, these ones looking even worse than the last. Here, you find the classic cars. Or what's left of them.
Instead of the classic cars, there's a pile of engine parts up on blocks. Outside, there's a thin layer of magazine articles, once glossy, gone to seed in a rusting spiral of razor wire atop the fence.
You see a book under a dying loop of grape vine, a familiar tome much-battered and dogeared. When you pull it free, it's a phone book full of empty pages.
On the way out, you see the other side of the FOR SALE sign:
$500 OBO