The death toll continues to rise in Murfreesboro as local senior citizens starve due to the closure of their primary food source, the “City Café” restaurant.
“It’s tragic, truly heartbreaking” noted TWRA spokesperson Charles Parsons. “When a species loses one of its primary food sources, it can take generations for the population to adapt. Most of these elderly Murfreesboroans have never known any other way to find their meals. When they can’t get their food here, whereas most of us would simply look elsewhere, they just starve.”
The City Café, located just off of Murfreesboro’s historic town square, is an area staple; at 112 years old, it’s one of the oldest existing businesses in the city. The eatery has long been known for being constantly populated an abundance of the town’s elderly, who tend to roost in the restaurant’s main dining room during the entirety of the City Café’s business day. Last week, business was brought to an abrupt halt when the state government closed City Café for failure to pay state taxes. The problem has since been remedied, and the historical establishment plans to re-open next Monday, but for some, that is simply too late.
“My dad didn’t know what to do. He just seemed lost” says a visibly upset Michael Halloran, whose 89-year-old father passed away Thursday from starvation. “For the first day or two, he’d just go and stand in front of [City Café] and stare into the darkened windows. All day. Then after a few days, he started wandering into Big B Cleaners with a coffee mug, holding it out at them, like he expected them to refill it. It was so sad. He was confused, upset, and wasting away. We tried to lead him to another restaurant; we held out plates of mixed greens and fried chicken, trying to lure him into a Cracker Barrel, but he just sighed and wandered back to the square.”
The passing of Mr. Halloran brings the total of City-Café-closure-starvation-deaths to 17, a frighteningly high number for only a week-and-a-half’s closure. “This will permanently affect the entire Murfreesboro Senior Citizen popluation” noted Parsons. “It’s thinning out the herd, as it were, at an alarming rate, too high a rate to be ignored. This is a terrible reminder of the dangers of tampering with an ecosystem. I blame global warming. And the Comptroller. These deaths are on their hands.”
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City Café “window” photo found at http://www.nashvillescene.com/gyrobase/ImageArchives?page=3&oid=2885642. Closure notice photo found at http://wgnsradio.com/city-cafe-closes-doors-after-over-100-years-cms-7194.
The Rhinestone 