Young People's Pride by Stephen Vincent Benet

Oliver finds himself walking along a long street in a city. It is not a distinguished street by any means -- there are neither plate-glass shops nor 'residences' on it -- just an ordinary street of little stores and small houses and occasionally an apartment building named for a Pullman car. In a good many houses the lights are out already -- it is nearly eleven o'clock and this part of St. Louis goes to bed early -- only the drugstores and the moving-picture theatres are still flaringly awake. His eyes read the sign that he passes mechanically, "Dr. Edwin K. Buffinton -- Chiropractor," "McMurphy and Kane's," "The Rossiter," with its pillars that look as if they had been molded out of marbled soap.

Thought. Memory. Pain. Pain pressing down on his eyeballs like an iron thumb, twisting wires around his forehead tighter and tighter till it's funny the people he passes don't see the patterns they make on his skin.