A fictional narrative as told by Northeast News Creative Director Bryan Stalder

The Avenue Inn sat long and narrow beneath its dropped ceiling, the yellowed panels sagging like tired eyelids. Neon High Life and Keystone Light signs buzzed faintly in the windows, casting jittery blues and yellows across the scarred bar where Bob and Randy had poured bottled beers and cheap whiskey for half a century. Behind them, the shelves bowed with golf trophies, a photo of Bob holding a fish nearly as long as his arm, and a few souvenirs from Randy’s trip to Italy in 1998. Smoke curled in lazy defiance of the city ordinance, rising past Schlitz posters and Chiefs schedules from the early ’90s, as if time itself had stopped somewhere back then.

Read more in this week’s print edition of Northeast News, or at Sub-stack…
https://elbryan2.substack.com/p/chapter-1-last-call-for-the-living

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