With a grip that would have shamed a hydraulic press and a heart that weighed more than the suitcase itself, Walter B. Hendricks descended the steps of his brownstone and turned his face, grimly, toward the great, rumbling unknown—which, in this case, was the Tenth Street bus station.

The suitcase, a venerable leather veteran of many a sales convention, contained all that remained of Walter B. Hendricks in the city: three suits, four shirts, a sheaf of faded commendations from a grateful management, and a photograph of a woman who was no longer his wife, her smile frozen in a happier time, like a fly in amber.

For ten years, Walter had been a cog in the great clock of commerce, a reliable, if unspectacular, salesman of fine stationery. But the clock had chimed its last for him. A younger, brighter, more automated cog had taken his place. With a severance package that felt more like a dismissal and a handshake that felt more like a farewell, Walter had decided to go. Where? It did not matter. The bus would decide. The destination was not a place, but an absence—an absence of familiar streets that now seemed to mock him.

He purchased a ticket to the next town down the line, a place called Hattiesburg, for no other reason than the name sounded quiet. The clerk, a man with the weary eyes of one who has seen too many departures, slid the ticket under the grille. Walter took it as if accepting his own sentence.

He found a scarred wooden bench beneath a clock whose slow, ticking jaw seemed to chew up the minutes. He was the very picture of a man defeated by the metropolis. A fellow bench-warmer, a disheveled philosopher with a bottle in a paper bag, nodded in solemn camaraderie. “They got you too, huh, brother?” he slurred.

Walter merely nodded, feeling a kinship with this shattered soul. This was his future now—a fraternity of the left-behind.

He checked his watch. Five minutes to departure. A sudden, sentimental pang struck him. He would buy a magazine for the journey, one last, profligate purchase to mark his exile. Approaching the same weary clerk, he laid down a one-dollar note.

“The Metropolitan Journal, please.”

The clerk pushed the paper toward him, then, as Walter turned to go, the man’s eyes—those tired, seen-it-all eyes—narrowed. He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial grumble.

“Say, mister,” he whispered, tapping a stubby finger on the lottery results printed boldly on the front page. “You see this? Some lucky so-and-so who bought a ticket at my counter yesterday has won the big one. Three million. Can you imagine? And they haven’t even come forward. Probably doesn’t even know.”

He chuckled, a dry, rattling sound. “Life’s a funny thing, ain’t it? A fella could be sitting right here, thinking his world’s ended, and not know he’s rich as Roosevelt.”

Walter offered a weak, polite smile. A nice story for someone else. He tucked the magazine under his arm and walked, a condemned man, toward the gate where his bus, idling like a patient beast, awaited to carry him off to obscurity.

It was then, as he reached for his ticket, that his fingers brushed against a different slip of paper in his vest pocket. A little, forgotten thing. He pulled it out, intending to discard it.

It was a lottery ticket.

Bought right here, at this very station, yesterday afternoon. A foolish, one-dollar gesture of hope after he’d been let go. He had completely forgotten.

With a heart that was no longer heavy but now pounding a wild, frantic rhythm against his ribs, Walter B. Hendricks stopped dead in his tracks. His eyes, wide and disbelieving, darted from the numbers on the crumpled ticket in his palm to the numbers printed in stark black ink on the front page of the Metropolitan Journal.

They matched.

Every last one.

The suitcase, which a moment before had held the sum of a diminished life, now seemed to contain nothing but air. The photograph of his wife suddenly seemed not a relic of the past, but a promise for the future. He was not a man fleeing failure. He was a king returning to reclaim his throne, incognito.

The bus driver called a final boarding call for Hattiesburg.

Walter B. Hendricks, a slow, magnificent smile spreading across his face, turned on his heel. He walked away from the idling bus, away from the bench of the broken, away from the life of quiet desperation. He walked past the weary clerk, giving him a wink that the man would never understand.

He stepped out of the bus station and into the brilliant, bustling afternoon. He hailed a taxi—a long, yellow, glorious taxi.

“Where to, Mac?” the driver asked.

Walter leaned back against the plush seat, the suitcase of his old life resting beside him like an amusing souvenir. He looked out at the city that had spurned him, the city that was now, unbeknownst to itself, his own.

“Drive,” he said, his voice rich with the quiet thrill of a perfect secret. “Just drive. Anywhere at all.”

And, you know I couldn’t possibly neglect the obligatory shameless self-promotion. New Yesterdays, a very nice Christmas stocking stuffer, is available through the following links: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.