The sign for Miller’s Mercantile is the color of rust and faded sky. It hangs from one hinge, swaying in the constant wind that scours everything flat along Highway 83. The town of Alston, population forty seven, exists as a brief interruption in the horizon line. You can miss it if you blink.
But you cannot miss Miller’s. It is the town’s anchor, a low slung brick building whose windows are filled less with merchandise and more with the collected dust of ninety years.
Inside, the air smells of oiled floorboards, coffee, and cardboard. Arden Miller stands behind a counter of scarred oak, the same one his grandfather built in 1928. His hands are thick and mapped with lines that have nothing to do with fortune and everything to do with fixing a generator in a blizzard or hauling feed sacks.
He moves with a slow economy, a man who has learned not to waste a single motion. The floorboards creak in a familiar pattern under his worn boots. He sells motor oil, bread, postage stamps, and work gloves stacked next to candy bars, a testament to the store’s dual role as a place of both necessity and small comfort.
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