Zim's Tee

Zim’s was a pause you didn’t fully register taking. It caught you mid-transit—between school and wherever else, between shifts, between plans that hadn’t quite formed yet. Light too bright for the hour, counter worn smooth by repetition, a grill doing its steady work behind a window that fogged and cleared and fogged again. You ended up there for nothing in particular, and it held you long enough for the day to reorder itself. Then you left, and it didn’t ask you to remember it. They started slipping away as rents climbed, and bigger chains squeezed them out, one corner at a time.