Congratulations on Finding the Map!

You’ll be shopping for groceries at the Powell and 39th Safeway after midnight tonight, where we all far too often find ourselves, and as you take the last bottle of two buck chuck off the shelf a piece of paper will flutter out from beneath it and come to rest on the floor.

You’ll pick it up quickly and hold it in your hands for a moment before you decide what to do. It’ll be yellowed with age, nearly crumbling. It’ll even have a few cigarette burns in it for good measure.

You’ll be afraid to open it, afraid to even touch it. This is where you have to make a choice.

If you choose to put it back on the shelf you’ll pay for your groceries and go home tonight. You’ll drink yourself to sleep as you always do and the next day a stock boy will find the note and toss it to the ground, where it will eventually be collected by a homeless man. Predictions hereafter become vague.

If you choose to keep the map you’ll tuck the still folded paper into your coat pocket with a quick glance around to see if anyone’s watching. There will be a young couple necking (I think that’s what they called it in your time) over by the pasta sauce, but they’ll have been too engaged to notice anything.

Then you’ll pay for your groceries, bouncing with nervous energy. The clerk will look at you with even more derision and puzzlement than usual, but for once you won’t care. You’ll just head back to your 1973 Hugo, bouncing with each step, and putter on home.

You won’t even unpack your groceries, you’ll be so excited. The wine will sit in a plastic bag, unopened, the Doritos you planned to consume slowly being crushed by its weight. Your mind, for the first time in months, couldn’t be farther from drink though.

Your eyes will be locked on the map as you slowly unfold it, electricity coursing through your fingertips each time they graze the paper.

To Be Continued!

Congratulations on finding the map!