My mother never let us keep coins in the house. If one rolled under the sofa, we left it there. If one landed in your pocket by mistake, you threw the trousers away. I didn’t understand. Money was just money. That’s what children think. The first man I watched disappear owned the bakery. He wasn’t cruel. He just couldn’t stop saying, “One more.” One more shop. One more field. One more year. By autumn, the floorboards groaned before he even stepped inside. By winter, his front door wouldn’t close. People stopped knocking. They stood across the road instead. Not because they hated him. Because they were waiting. The morning it happened, there wasn’t a scream. Every loose thing in the street, bottle caps, nails, spoons, a child’s red marble, slid toward his house all at once. Then everything went quiet. When the dust settled, there was no house. No man. Just a smooth black stone sitting where the front door used to be. My mother walked home without saying a word. That evening she dug a hole behind the garden, wrapped our savings in an old towel, and buried them beneath the tomatoes. She never looked at the money again. Years later, when a silver coin stopped at my shoe instead of rolling past me, I understood why.
