Devonne Brown

Disclaimer: I fill in gaps with fiction instead of fact check. I write fiction.

DP Benches

The dust cloud sparkled. Dark blue and green glittery light stuck to the houses and grass blades. The leaves high in the trees sparkled too. It was the aurora of the daylight, a rainbow would have been ashamed to show its face, so pale in comparison, a bad case of sibling rivalry. 

It settled on the whole town of Hurricane, the old part, with the bank, the streetlight, the dp benches, the park, and the railroad track. That’s the part you look at from the parking meter when you’re standing by the fire station. To see the edges of the art deco bank covered in blue and green sparkles was something out of a snowglobe.

The bank is a lovely piece of architecture and marks the center of town. A testament to Jack Wilson, CFO and loan office of the bank for seventy years. They might as well name it after him.

 The traffic light there was the first one ever lit in Putnam County. The drive through somehow caused an issue with a fool at the drive through who didn’t want to to turn right on red, thus the traffic light.  The sparkles did nothing but improve it. 

Jack had the dp benches installed a long time ago. At first, folks would come out of the bank and sit and ruminate Jack’s yay or nay. Sometimes, he’d walk out with them. Later, they became a place for the old men to sit and jaw each other to death. They’d best each other’s tales of who got the biggest fish or the worst case of food poisoning down at Brunetti’s.  It became a place only for the old men of town to hang. The “dp benches.”

“Jack, I haven’t seen you sit on the dp benches. Don’t you talk. Everything is so beautiful with this blue and green sparkle dust on them, I wish we could stay here forever. Just look how beautiful.” 

Jack had to agree that it was indeed one of the more beautiful sights he’d seen in his lifetime. Norman Rockwell paints while on acid trip. 

“Why does dp stand for?” I asked Jack.

“What? The dp benches?”

Jack started laughing. A guy in a tellers line behind him said, “You mean the famous dead pecker benches of Hurricane National Bank?
DP Benches, nonfiction.