<div style="text-align: right"><span style="font-family:Herr Von Muellerhoff"> <span style="font-size: 26px">Tell the truth, but tell it slant.<br/>
- Emily Dickinson</span></span>​</div><br/><br/>It was a house before it was a pharmacy.  A plain house, with a wooden frame and clapboard siding.  Two stories, with a steeply pitched roof and a chimney running up the center of the building.  It was small, but it suited the man who purchased it.  Elias Abernathy lived alone, and he seldom entertained company.  The rooms meant for this purpose were instead filled with shelves and an assortment of ornate bottles, and the majority of those bottle were filled with tinted water.  Appearances mattered more than the contents, and his clientele felt more secure when they saw a vast array of tinctures and treatments.  They didn't need to know that he used less than half of them.<br/><br/>Elias kept his shop open from morning to evening, turning around a sign to convey those rare times when he locked up the shop in the middle of the day.  To say that he was a recluse was going too far, but he did spend far too much time clearing cobwebs, polishing bottles, and making excuses to himself about driving away business with his infrequent absences.<br/><br/>He'd grown up in the woods, with his immediate family.  Now and again, he saw neighbors and more distant kin, but it wasn't until he set off on his own that he experienced the luxury of a town where he might cross paths with a dozen people in a single day.  And that was in a town where he swiftly learned the names of everyone who lived there, where he gathered with them every Sunday.<br/><br/>For three years, he'd lived on the coast, six hundred miles from the hollar.  Elias wasn't yet familiar with city life, in no small part because he avoided it.  The streets were far too crowded, and though he'd learned his own neighborhood thoroughly, he was less confident when he ventured downtown, or away from residential areas.<br/><br/>This particular day was no more eventful than any other.  Nearly a dozen customers came through his doors, most of them seeking treatment from a chemist because they couldn't afford a doctor; he was amongst the few willing to trade in services and wares, and while he occasionally came dangerously close to not earning enough to pay his mortgage, he never went hungry, and his home and business were well maintained, even if the property was quite old.<br/><br/>As the day stretched on and the street grew more quiet, he ventured outside with a ladder to polish up the small windows.  Above the front door, a sign that advertised DRUGGIST - he cleaned that, too, and then he descended to sweep up the porch.  It seemed an unnecessary chore, perhaps, but Elias had found that he needed every advantage, no matter how small, to compensate for his mountain heritage.  As soon as he started to speak, expressions changed like shutters closing tight to weather the coastal storms.  To the New Englanders, he was an uneducated interloper.  It got under his skin when he was a new transplant to the region, but as time passed and the same faces started to reappear at his shop, he stopped taking every minor criticism to heart.<br/><br/>Still, he kept the pharmacy immaculate and charged slightly less than the competition.<br/><br/>When the sun started to set, he flipped the sign to closed.  To the left of the door, a polished steel bell.  He wasn't above opening shop at all hours of the night.  Between turning a profit and helping someone who couldn't wait until morning, he couldn't bring himself to mind the occasional lost hours of sleep.  Not that he went directly from minding the shop to his bed.  Elias went upstairs to change into a sleepshirt, and then settled down in his favorite chair with a glass of brandy and a book that he'd read numerous times before.  The familiar smell of it, and the worn, soft pages were ideal for slowing his mind and body as the night descended.