Writing Prompt: He pulled his hat low.

Happy Friday everyone. Are you ready for the final prompt of the week? I know I am so set your timers and let’s kick this morning’s prompt off.

Interesting. I like the idea of returning to a once familiar place as a stranger. I will have to think about this, but I think it might be a story I flush out. Not sure if it will be a short story or something longer, but I like the idea.

Friday, December 22^nd: He pulled his hat low.

He pulled his hat low.  He doubted anyone would recognize him after all this time, but he was unwilling to take the chance.   He had been officially declared dead more than twenty years prior and he wanted to keep it that way.  It was why he fought against this assignment.  Why he suggested one of the others took it.  But he never told the others he was dead, or where he came from.  At least not officially.

They had a name and location of birth as well as all the necessary dates on their paperwork.  It was all official.  It was legally given to him when he was declared dead.  But he was not allowed to tell anyone that and therefore any of his reasons for why he would not want to come to this place were not enough inventive for a reassignment. 

They thought he was biased against the area for other, more common reasons.  He didn’t disabuse them of the notions but again, it left him in a poor bargaining place.  In the end he was sent.  He was determined to do this job as quickly and efficiently as possible so he could leave. 

He slipped into the neighborhood as an outsider.  He no longer looked as though he belonged.  Everything about him was different from the person he was when he lived here that he almost believed it himself. 

Almost.

A lot changed in twenty years, but a lot remained the same.  He found the familiar threatened to dredge up memories he long since buried and had no desire to resurrect.  Like him, they needed to stay dead.  He focused instead on the new elements of the neighborhood.  The differences from his childhood. 

That building on the corner was new.  The one that once stood there was too badly damaged in the war to be left standing.  It had been removed and a new building built in a newer style.  Its glass and metal façade jarred against the warn brick of the building beside it. 

‘Becky Haveran’s building,’ he told himself before he could block it out the image of his first girlfriend coming down the front stairs of the apartment building to meet him flashed though his mind.  Her father would not let him come upstairs to meet her.  She had to come down to him while Mrs. Fischer in the first floor apartment studied him through the window.  He knew that he dare not even hold Becky’s hand while in sight of Mrs. Fischer as it would be reported to Becky’s father as inappropriate behavior.

He shook the thought away.  ‘It is just an apartment building,’ he thought as he walked past.  There was no one coming through the door and no one looking through the front window.  In fact the front window was boarded up as were several of the other windows in the apartment building. On the front door he saw a sign.

The once proud building had been condemned.

“Too much structural damage after the war,” someone said.  He turned to find an older man shifting his gaze between him and the building. “Thought it was fine at first, but then the cracks started to appear.”