The convenience store on South Halsted Street opened at six in the morning and closed at midnight, except on holidays when it opened at eight and closed at ten, except when Frank Miller was working, in which case the hours seemed to stretch into something that had nothing to do with time and everything to do with waiting for something that would never come.

Frank was forty-one. He had been a welder at the shipyard for twelve years, until the shipyard closed, or moved, or went bankrupt—he couldn't remember which, because the memory had eroded the way everything eroded in Chicago, slowly and then all at once. Now he worked the night shift at a convenience store that sold things he didn't need to people who didn't matter, in a neighborhood that nobody visited unless they had to.

The land behind the store was the reason he stayed.

It was a strip of earth maybe thirty feet wide, running parallel to the railroad tracks, choked with weeds and broken glass and the occasional rusted car frame that had been abandoned so long it had become part of the landscape. No one else wanted it. The city had stopped collecting trash on that side of the tracks three years ago. The property tax bill sat unpaid in Frank's apartment, accumulating penalties like a slow-growing plant.

But it was his. Or rather, it had been his grandfather's, and his grandfather had given it to him with instructions that were clear and simple and, Frank sometimes thought, insane.

His grandfather, Edward, had been a rich man. Rich in the way that Chicago made rich men—through real estate, through connections, through knowing which alderman to buy dinner with in November. Edward had died when Frank was six, and all Frank remembered of him was a story his mother told him at bedtime, a story about a man who had tried to cheat death and lost everything anyway.

"Your grandfather," his mother would say, "thought he could buy good fortune. He found a piece of land—everyone said it was special, that whoever was buried there would bring luck to their family. So he did something terrible. He arranged to be buried there while he was still alive. He took medicine to make himself look dead, and they put him in the ground, and for three days he was alive down there."

Frank would wake up screaming from that story. His mother would sit beside his bed and hold his hand until he calmed down.

"What happened?" he'd ask.

"They opened the grave. He was still alive. But the land—something was wrong with it. His horse died. His youngest son went mad. They had to move him."

"And the land?"

"Your grandfather's family lost everything after that. The fortune, the house, the cars. Everything. The land stayed empty for a while. Then a poor family moved in nearby. The father died on the land accidentally, and his son—your great-grandfather—inherited it. And somehow, despite everything, the boy became successful. He joined the army, fought in a war, came home with medals and money and a family."

"Grandfather tried to steal luck," Frank said.

"Yes."

"And it didn't work."

"No."

Frank had never understood why his grandfather had done it. Greed, maybe. Or desperation. Or the belief, common among the newly rich, that money could purchase not just things but fate itself. Edward Ashworth had been a man who believed in purchase. He had bought land and houses and influence and, in the end, he had tried to buy luck.

The land had rejected him.

Frank worked the night shift because the nights were quiet. The store was empty from two until four in the morning, and that was his time. He would sit behind the counter with a cup of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago and watch the railroad tracks stretch into darkness, listening to the occasional train that passed through, carrying things he would never see to places he would never visit.

Sometimes he thought he heard voices from the land behind the store. Not the supernatural kind—just the wind, moving through broken glass and rusted metal, making sounds that his tired brain interpreted as speech. But sometimes, in the deep hours between three and four, when the city was quietest and the darkness was thickest, he heard something that sounded almost like arguing. Two voices, muffled and distant, speaking in a language he couldn't understand.

He never mentioned it to anyone. What would he say? "Hey, boss, I think the abandoned lot behind the store is haunted by my grandfather's failed attempt to cheat fate?" His boss would fire him. His friends would laugh. His therapist would prescribe something that would make the voices stop, or make him stop hearing them, or make him stop caring.

Frank didn't want to stop hearing them. The voices were all he had that connected him to Edward, to the story, to the land. They were a reminder that something had happened there, something important, something that had cost a man his life and his family his fortune and his grandson his future.

The land behind the store was ugly. It was a scar on the neighborhood, a place where weeds grew through cracked concrete and trash accumulated in piles that shifted with the wind like slow-moving animals. But it was his, and he tended it in his way—he swept the edges, removed the largest pieces of debris, and occasionally sat on a rusted bench he had dragged from the alley and watched the railroad tracks disappear into the distance.

His mother died two years ago. His father had been gone before that, lost to the bottle and the unemployment line and the slow violence of a life that had no direction. Frank was alone in the apartment above the store, in a bed that smelled of stale sweat and regret, eating food from cans because he couldn't be bothered to cook.

The unpaid tax bill sat on the kitchen table. The store manager stopped by once a week to check inventory and collect cash from the register. The neighbors stopped looking over the fence. The city stopped maintaining the streetlights.

Everything eroded. Everything faded. Everything became what it always was when you left it alone: nothing.

One morning in November, Frank woke up late. The sun was already high when he opened the store, and the shelves needed restocking, and the register was short by twelve dollars that he was sure he hadn't taken. He restocked the shelves. He counted the register. He locked the door at midnight and went upstairs to a bed that smelled of stale sweat and regret.

The land behind the store remained. The weeds grew taller. The rust spread. The railroad tracks carried their endless cargo into the darkness.

And somewhere beneath the earth, if there was anyone left to hear it, Edward Ashworth's voice argued with the wind, insisting that he had chosen that ground, that he had earned that ground, that he would not leave.

But the earth does not argue back. The earth simply is. And the stone in the river does not move, no matter how much the water flows around it, no matter how many hands reach down to touch it, no matter how many men spend their lives trying to understand why it is there and what it means.

It is there. That is all.

Frank went to work the next night. And the night after that. And the night after that. The store opened at six. It closed at midnight. The register was counted. The shelves were restocked. The land behind the store waited.