Crunching over the gravel parking lot, Jared stopped. “Huh. That’s weird.” Reaching down wasn’t easy. The gout wreaked havoc on his right hip, especially the past eight years. Jared had the occasional flareup, but now it was so bad that it dropped him to his knees. That’s not why he bent over. The pain wasn’t overly concerning to him, but he and Betty had been married long enough that if she were to see this? She’d send him straight away to either urgent care or the hospital’s ER. In either case, she’d be overreacting. And he’d tell her as much – after he went to the doctor.

An avid coin collector, Jared knew good coins from bad ones. A bad one was worth the amount printed on it. On the other hand, a good one was worth three or more times the coin’s value. Jared had seen all kinds of currency. Lots of coins from Canada. A few from China. A handful from Russia or its neighboring countries. He had one or two from Africa. And thousands of coins from the United States of America. But this coin? The one he picked up? He’d never seen anything like it.

Jared drove an old Ford F-100 pickup sitting less than a foot from where he picked up the coin, just outside Jim’s store. Good thing, too. The truck gave him more stability than his cane with four feet, a tennis ball on each foot. It worked well enough to get him to and from the truck and into Jim’s grocery store. Jim’s didn’t have just a grocery store. It was a catchall, carrying everything from milk, eggs, and bread to miscellaneous items like light bulbs, cat litter, birdseed, and fish. Jim loved his tropical fish and thought it would be a nice addition to the local corner store. Not thinking much about the implications of fish in the small town of Idley, he bought 25 goldfish, tossed them in a basic aquarium, and fed them once every few days. But the townsfolk loved goldfish and asked him to get more. In the first week, he sold all 25 fish at a 275% markup, a nice little profit for the store, even if it was only a few pennies worth. Jim’s wife, Eustice, said it would cost him more than it was worth, but she died a few years before he got the guts to buy the goldfish. Today, Jim stocked over a hundred species of aquamarine life, including starfish and shrimp.

Hunched over like he was, Jared struggled to find the strength to get up. Leaning on the bumper of the Ford, he caught his breath. “Getting old sucks,” Jared muttered, straining to get up.