Vacant

They left. One after the other, the stores went dark, the pieces were lost, the sparkling cardboard houses crumbled when a mouse got into the box and chewed them up. Once the factory shut down, there were no more jobs, no more picnics, no more watchbands breaking under the pull of small children.

Trains no longer stopped and until finally, the trains no longer went by. Weeds grew up in the tracks and then the tracks were covered with cement.

The needles fell off the tree and the tree went out in the trash. The child grew up and remembered it all. She wonders if there will ever be another town so beautiful, or another life so charmed as the one outgrown in Hatboro.