<p><em>“In great loss there is often the freedom of discovery.”</em> - Isherwood Williams</p><p>…</p><p>It was midmorning on a rainy day when the traveler knocked open the door of the Siren Café.&nbsp;A few months had passed since Delores joined Jolene at the store.&nbsp;A few months since they’d cleaned out all the corpses and moved on with the basic, hard business of surviving.&nbsp;</p><p>Jolene had stopped pretending to run the store as if nothing had happened. She’d come to grips with the loss. Even so, the Café was still her locus of gravity in the apocalypse, and she and Delores showed up each day and swept the sidewalks.</p><p>They needed something to do and minding the Café was as good as anything else in the apocalypse.&nbsp;So, as supplies dwindled and weeks passed, they showed up every day and did what they could for the occasional survivors who stumbled in for the small number of survivors who stumbled in.</p><hr><p style='color:grey; font-size:0.75em;'> Hosted on Acast. See <a style='color:grey;' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer' href='https://acast.com/privacy'>acast.com/privacy</a> for more information.</p>