The Paperweight I. Tom Briggs found the lottery ticket in the drawer of the cash register at the gas station he ran off Route 62 in a town that did not appear on most maps. It was a Tuesday in March 2003, and he was closing up after a shift that had consisted of three fill-ups, one car wash, and a can of soda that a trucker bought and drank in the parking lot while sitting on the bumper of his rig. Tom was cleaning the register, counting the till, doing the same thing he had done every night for eleven years, when his fingers found the ticket wedged behind the cash tray. He pulled it out. It was a lottery ticket. He did not remember buying one. He looked at the number. 047219. He looked at it for about ten seconds. Then he put it in his toolbox and used it to hold down a stack of repair invoices. II. The gas station sat at the intersection of Route 62 and a road that used to be more important and now was not. A hundred years ago, there had been a general store next door, and a post office, and a bench where men sat and talked about the weather. Now there was just the gas station, the empty lot next to it, and a line of pines that marked the edge of something that used to be a farm and now was just trees and dirt and the occasional deer. Tom had bought the station in 1992, after his divorce, after the house in Columbus, after his son went to live with his ex-wife and called him on birthdays and Christmas and tried to make it sound like he meant it. Tom had bought the station because it was cheap and because it was quiet, and because he had spent forty-five years doing other people's work and he wanted to do something that required nothing of him except showing up and turning a handle and counting change. He did that for eleven years. The kids who worked for him came and went. A boy named Kyle was sixteen when he started and nineteen when he quit and went to work at a Walmart in Chillicothe. A girl named Tanya worked for six months and then got pregnant and left. A guy named Derek lasted two weeks and then quit because Tom made him sweep the floors. Tom did not mind. He did not mind the turnover or the silence or the way the station slowly deteriorated around him, the paint peeling, the pumps sticking, the sign that said GAS in letters that had been bright once and were now faded to a pale pink that you could only see if you knew to look for it. He lived in a small apartment on the other side of town, the kind of apartment that cost three hundred dollars a month and had carpet that smelled like someone had spilled something in 1987 and never cleaned it up. He came home after work, ate dinner (usually something from a can or a box), watched the news for twenty minutes, turned off the TV, and went to bed. His ex-wife called once in a while. His son's grades were fine. His mother was in a home in Dayton and didn't remember him much but smiled when he visited, which was more than Tom had expected. Life went on. It was not a good life. It was not a bad life. It was a life. III. Three years passed. The ticket stayed in the toolbox, holding down invoices for oil changes and tire rotations and things that Tom did not read because they were all the same. Change oil. Check filters. Close register. Count till. Go home. In the spring of 2006, the highway expansion finally reached the town. It had been planned for years, debated at city council meetings that Tom never attended, argued about in newspapers he did not read. But now it was happening. The road was being widened. The intersection of Route 62 and the old farm road was being moved half a mile east. And the gas station, which had been sitting on the old alignment, was going to be demolished. Tom got the notice in April. Demolition by June. Compensation offered: forty thousand dollars for the land, twenty thousand for the structures. Tom signed the papers without reading them carefully. He had already found a new apartment, smaller than the last one, in a part of town he did not know and did not care about. He packed his things on a Saturday in May. The gas station was empty by noon. The pumps were disconnected. The sign was taken down. The building stood empty for the first time in eleven years, its windows like blind eyes staring at a road that no longer existed. Tom drove away in his truck, the apartment's furniture loaded into a rental van behind him. He did not look back. IV. The new apartment was on East 9th Street, above a hardware store that had been closed for two years and would probably stay closed for two more. The walls were thin. The neighbor on the left played country music at a volume that suggested he was angry at it. The neighbor on the right was an old woman who never made any sound at all, which was somehow worse. Tom settled in. He unpacked the furniture. He put the toolbox on the workbench in the corner of the living room, which was also his dining room and also the place where he kept the television when it was not in use. He opened the toolbox to find a screwdriver. The screwdriver was not there. Instead, the lottery ticket was there, still holding down a stack of invoices, still yellowed and creased and smelling like the inside of a cash register. Tom looked at it. He did not think about it. He closed the toolbox and went to the kitchen and made a sandwich. That night, he watched television. The news came on, then a movie he had seen before, then a talk show with a woman who was crying about a man who had left her for her sister. Tom ate his sandwich and watched the screen and did not think about anything in particular. Then the lottery segment came on. The host, a man in a suit with too many teeth, announced the numbers. Tom was eating when he heard them. He stopped chewing. He looked at the screen. He looked at the toolbox. The number was 047219. He sat very still. He ate the rest of his sandwich. He turned off the TV. He went to bed. The third prize. Five thousand dollars. Not the jackpot. Not even close to it. Just five thousand dollars, which was nothing and everything, depending on how you looked at it. Tom looked at the toolbox. The ticket was still inside, holding down the invoices. He did not open it. He did not take it out. He lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to the country music through the wall and thought about nothing at all. In the morning, he got up. He made coffee. He went to the hardware store across the street and bought a newspaper and a can of soup. He came home, opened the newspaper, and read the sports section. The ticket stayed in the toolbox. --- ## © 2026 - Authored by Z R ZHANG ( EL9507135 -- パスポート番号[ちゅうごく] 중국 여권 번호 Номер паспорта หมายเลขหนังสือเดินทาง Passnummer رقم جواز السفر CHN Passport) The aforementioned Author hereby grants to OXFORD INDUSTRIAL HOLDING GROUP (ASIA PACIFIC) CO., LIMITED （BRN74685111） all economic property rights, including but not limited to the rights of: reproduction, distribution, rental, exhibition, performance, communication to the public via information network, adaptation, compilation, commercial operation, authorization for third-party use, and rights enforcement. Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term of such rights shall be 49 years from the date of publication. To contact author， please email to datatorent@yeah.net