#13 Treasure

On my way to work, there's a little drain near the ever-busy construction site. It was big enough to accidentally get your foot stuck in it, but not for a child to squeeze through. The drain was right behind the juice stall, where the Ah-yee always uses two and a half oranges for a lukewarm cup of fresh juice. At the stall, there was a man in a suit who bought one every morning without fail. He always gets there before I do. My cup of juice always has his leftover half of an orange.

This morning, he was there again. But he was unusually impatient, struggling to get his coins out of his pocket as he balanced his briefcase and the cup in his free hand.

A coin fell. I don't think he noticed. It hit the concrete road and slowly rolled off to the side, towards the drain, and in the moment it takes for you to blink, a long scaley tongue whips out from the drain and swallows the coin. It then let out a guttural growl; not even the incessant drilling from the construction site could mask it.

I like to imagine a dragon living in the drain, collecting and hoarding pieces of runaway coins, lunchbox tinfoil and shiny rocks as its own mountain of treasure.

*****

I had written another little piece that I really liked for this prompt, but if you haven't realised it by now we're not really able to write exactly what we want here. Under the advice of my mother and David (who've been reading all of these stories before I upload), I'll save that for another rainy day. So this is the replacement instead.