Micah, a short, balding man with a very bad case of nerves, constantly looking over his shoulder, startled at the slightest sound, a worrier… and well he might be.

His wife of thirty years died after a too-long illness that depleted their medical insurance and caused Micah to take out loans, over a three-year period, but when those were repaid, the bank would no longer help him, and the same was true of loan companies, as they al wanted him to sign the jewelry store and contents over as collateral on the loans, which he was afraid to do, so he found a loan shark who would let him have money on his signature, with the specification that when he was able, he would pay the money back, with a hefty interest.

Micah and his daughter have been running the store together these last few years since her mother died. She is about to graduate from NYU with a business degree,
and then she will take over the store and Micah can retire with a small stipend from the store, and his daughter will have something to make her life bearable in this world of toil and sorrow.

Micah hoped this would make life better for his daughter, better than it was for him and his wife. However, the loan shark has decided, about a month ago, that the loans are now due and payable. The shark doesn’t work alone; he is a front man for a very large and very well-known organization, that makes a huge profit from the misery of others.

They have loaned Micah more than four hundred thousand dollars, all of which went to medical costs, doctors, hospitals, with nothing set aside. Now the backers of the loan shark want to be repaid. Not in a while – but right now.

Micah, naturally, doesn’t have that kind of money. All he has in this world is his store, and his daughter. And now he has learned too late, that he did, after all, sign over his store in return for the loans, actually in return for the opportunity to get the loans – sort of a “fee”, if you will.

He is here, waiting at a bus stop, to be picked up by a limousine, to go and sign over his store in entirety, to the organization, in full payment for his loans. He took the loans to try to save his wife’s life, to help pay for her medicines and treatments at the hospitals and clinics, and for the specialist’s office visits, but in the end the disease won out, and all the money in the world would not have helped her.

So what I said earlier, that all Micah has in this world is his store and his daughter, must be amended; soon he will not have his store any more. And at the moment, in order to insure that he doesn’t decide to run away or otherwise try to get out of the agreement he has with the organization that has so very kindly loaned him money all these years, at the moment he doesn’t have his daughter, either — they have her. She should be in the limo when they pull up to pick up Micah, but at the moment she is with them, as a sort of insurance that Micah will do as they want him to do.