Rubber Relic
Rubber Relic Looking in my side mirror, I saw the cop who’d checked my documents and taken down my registration stare down at her clipboard for a moment, then tilt her head, lifting her radio up to her mouth. I caught a glimpse of myself frowning as I turned my attention to parking, turning the van round on the concrete strip so the back doors were as near to the unit’s shutter as I could get them. I noticed my knee was jiggling up and down as I lit a cigarette and picked up my cap from the dashboard, pulling it on in the way I imagined a man with nothing to hide would. The padlock on the shutter had rusted in the eleven years since I'd last shut it; I had meant to come back and change it, but I never got the nerve up. I figured after dad died I could put some money from the house toward getting a company to come down, crate everything up and dump it in another state. At least this way I was saving some cash. The shutter came up, and I stared for a while at the conten