Chapter 1: Upton's U-Store It

People gather at a self storage business to bid on the abandoned belongings of others.

      Stuart Peters removed his glasses, ran his fingers, from front to back, through his untamed brown hair, and scanned the chain-link fence that surrounded the shabby lot. The coils of razor wire at the top of the fence made him feel more like he was in a prison yard than a storage facility. The cracks snaked across the old blacktop like jagged varicose veins. Where there were no cracks, ankle deep potholes marred the gravel-strewn landscape. Beyond the fence, abandoned, dingy gray buildings dominated the skyline on three sides and the murky, stagnant, brown river crept slowly by on the fourth side.

      He stood off to the side of the moderate crowd, which had gathered for the auction of nine abandoned storage units. He wasn’t a terribly social man to begin with, and Irene Capuano’s presence in the group of waiting bidders only served to intensify his desire to be anywhere else but here. Irene was a frequent bidder at a lot of the same auctions that Stuart attended. She was a sweet old woman, but she grated on his nerves beyond belief. Her gravelly voice seemed to bark out “Bid here!” every time he thought his last bid was good enough. Over the last two and a half years, Irene had probably out-bid Stuart on a dozen units and driven up the cost of his winning bids by three thousand dollars on the units that he did manage to win.

      If not for the memory of the locker that he picked up here a year ago, he wouldn’t have been here at all. He’d paid $350 for a five by ten unit. He’d have gotten it for $200 if Irene hadn’t bid him up another $150, but this time he’d beaten the old biddy. The locker was filled with tidily packed cardboard boxes. Most of the boxes were filled with neatly folded, but moth-eaten boys clothing, it was the last three boxes that held the big score. Each of those three boxes was filled with photo albums, which Stuart nearly threw away without opening. He would have thrown them out if not for Junior Coleman. Coleman was the young homeboy sort who’d worked at Upton’s U-Store It. Junior badgered him so persistently that he relented and retrieved the photo albums from the trash. Instead of unwanted photos of someone else’s family, it turned out that the albums were filled with baseball cards, valuable, old baseball cards, rookie cards for the likes of Seaver, Ryan, Clemente, Rose and other baseball legends, all neatly organized and held to the pages by clingy, plastic sheet protectors.

      It was a veritable who’s who of Hall of Fame baseball players. The storage unit turned out to be worth two hundred seventeen dollars without the baseball cards and over ninety two thousand dollars with the cards. Later that week after Stuart had the cards appraised and sold them to a collector, he went back to Upton’s U-Store It and presented Junior with a check for five thousand dollars. His friends and family thought he was crazy, but it was the right thing to do. He knew that if not for Junior, he would have thrown those cards in the trash. Besides, it didn’t hurt to have Junior for a friend. Junior always told him everything he knew about the abandoned units and their owners, and that often helped.

 

      “Where’s Junior?” Stuart asked Barbara Jean Upton, joining her as she walked by on her way to start the auction.

      “I had to let him go, he was late to work too many times.”

      Stuart’s stomach tensed. His edge was gone. He didn’t have advance knowledge of who owned each unit anymore. For the few moments that it took for everyone to get to the first unit, he considered leaving. But he decided that since he was here, he might as well hang around and at least have a look at the units.

Reviews

[?]

Hey thats a nice story and yes it was the right thing to do.
Now I am actually wanting to see whats gonna happen next. What will he find? Will Jr. come back? Will he give the old lady a run for her money, upping the bid on her? hmmmmmm lol
Nice story

[Dms]

I'm right with Lady on this one. My mind went straight to that show. Nice metaphors working through the opening and the flashback injects a hopeful mood into the scene. There was a slight error in the last sentence where you wrote, "For the few moments it (took) everyone to (get to) the first unit...I think? Other than that it's a smooth read, though short for a chapter.

[Lady]

Interesting beginning. Reminds me very much of that new television show where a group of men raid these storage units that people couldn't afford to keep up any longer.

I'm curious to see where you end up taking this. Stuart seems as though he's a likable character. My only wish would be that you give us a little more description for him. I barely know what he looks like, other than the fact that he has brown hair and glasses. I know it's only the first chapter, but maybe give us a few more hints about his personality.

I also spotted a sentence in the first paragraph that could be re-worded:

"The coils of razor wire at the top of the fence made him feel more like he was in a prison yard than a storage facility. The cracks snaked across the old blacktop like jagged varicose veins. Where there were no cracks, ankle deep potholes marred the gravel-strewn landscape."

Maybe change it to something like...

"The coils of razor wire at the top of the fence made him feel more like he was in a prison yard than a storage facility. Endless cracks snaked across the old blacktop like jagged varicose veins, and where there were no cracks, ankle deep potholes that marred the gravel-strewn landscape."

It just sounds a bit more fluid, rather than broken up and repetitive with the opening word "the".

Hope this helps. Great work! Keep the chapters coming.