Excerpt: The wind had picked up some dust and pushed it into the street. Cities were a lot closer to wide open lands back then, and one could look down the grid and perceive the emptiness at its end. The sudden gust had nearly knocked her cap off its tilt, so as she half walked, half wandered across, she delicately held it onto her head. Then it was gone – the wind, that is, along with that other thing. Oh God.

During those times, a carpet bag full of pennies could mean a month’s worth of groceries. And she’d lost it. The bag, and all those pennies – taken in by a gutter scammer.

The boy seemed to be really hurt, twisted as he was along the curb. She’d only bent down for a moment to try to soothe him, when she realized the bag she’d placed beside her was gone, and now the boy was gone as well, running into an alley, no longer hurt.

She’d been the penny peddler for almost a year now, selling all kinds of thigs for the copper coin, a flower, a piece of verse, a knitted tea cozy. Sometimes she would be engaged to read to an elderly shut in, or for help with an errand. Often she would work door to door, showing her basket of items, and if no interest was elicited, she’d quickly and humbly inquire if there was any chore she might assist with for a penny. She had some regulars but no contracts, some aspirations but no plans. And now she had no money.

The amount of pennies she had accumulated would have represented an almost vulgar amount of riches had pennies been worth more than, well, pennies. She’d reached both hands into the bag many times to gather to coins, and feel the weight of them. She reveled at the feeling of running them through her fingers. She loved the sound of them hitting each other as they landed back into their nest. She adored the saturated copper color of them, all together cradled by the textured sides of the bag. That bag.

The bag was the last thing she had of her mother’s, and as the time slowly passed on the walk home to fetch her basket of saleables, she realized that the crime had been a double theft. Her mother had died a painful death, she was told, for she had been kept away from the rented room they lived in for much of the horrible end. She was taken in by an unmarried Aunt, who died some years later, during a tragic stillbirth. Such were the travails of being a woman in that age. The bag, supposedly once a gift from an old suitor, first filled with her playthings, and them repurposed as a bank bag, had soldiered on with her. Now she was alone, without the last remnant of her past to anchor her to a place, a time, a family.

They say that crimes like this often have unintended consequences and that thefts often provide the victim, with circumstances that are impossible to fathom, with great riches over the fullness of time. Our girl could not think of such things, alone there, sleepwalking on the sidewalk. She was bereft and lightheaded, devastated by the losses of the day. But she would get her basket and she would hit the streets for the evening passers by. It was payday, that’s why she was out with the bag so early in the afternoon, on her way to the bank to exchange the coins for bills before the rush. She spied a few perfect daisies just next to her in a prairie lot. She plucked them from their bed to add to her basket.

-Danny Grosso