He had these impossibly dark eyes, the intense kind that looked like they knew what you were thinking, even before you did. We both looked away so fast that I had to wonder if we'd eyelocked at all.

Here stands a last bastion of mid-century analog quintessence, a genuine hole-in-the-wall oozing with spirit, seemingly spared by a modern design tsunami of Corporate Memphis and minimalist logos.

[…] the whole country aslosh in cash from a buoyant stock market, demand for the really dirt-cheap travel in which we specialized had dropped.

She'd barely wireframed it, here, and there was no there there, no interiority.