She breathed in. Evenly. Without effort. It had rained, and the city air had been cleansed. It was easy to inhale, even logical, and for an appreciable length of time, she just stood there, beside her car, in front of the greatest superstore in the Twin Cities.
Then she made her move.
A sickly draft of air tugged at the ends of her subdued black flannels just as she reached for the handle on the glass door of the brightly lit superstore. It wheezed out of the thin slit at the bottom, moist and cold, and false, smelling like the insides of a rich man’s coffin, foliaged with refrigerated flowers. And refrigerated peas in cold misty plastic packets. It made her jerk her hand away partly, startled, undecided, like an allegory, barely there. The flat two dimensional gust had, by now, grown warmer, and murkier, and it now lay limp on the sidewalk between her feet. She looked down at it.
She was back in her home, in the sunny south, and had just woken up after that tiring weekend of ghost partying, and now, as she flip flopped down to the front door in her pajamas, a metal mug with hot rancid coffee in one hand, and the other shielding her bleary eyes from the strident golden beams coming in from the window slats to her left, she imagined she was squelching whiskey dregs in every step, accompanied by a quirky ‘choo choo’ sound. Under the front door lay some yellowed letters, probably delivered last Friday, she thought, and just when she bent to pick them up, the realization, the time of the year, struck her playfully on the head like a prank. A wry smile skipped lightly over her face.
She looked up just in time to catch it reflected in the glass, before it disappeared amongst the undulations of her long drawn countenance, lit up like an 80s discotheque display board by the frothy fluorescing lights from the insides of the store. It had been a fleet-footed look of apprehension; of a tidy nervousness. She looked down again, at the space between her feet. There was nothing to be seen, just like there never had been.
The letter was blank. A loud blank rectangle of paper, with no more a purpose than hide what it did, when she held it in her hand. Abdominal parts of the old burgundy upholstered couch. Half of the chinaclay tumescent Buddha on the mantlepiece above the couch. Some knick-knacks. To be honest, the blankness staring at her from the paper wasn’t surprising; the surprise it evoked therefore was.
She gave up trying to find anything there. She knew she was actually trying to stall the inevitable. She knew she had to go in. She knew she had no say in the matter. She couldn’t possibly be altering alternate reality. She rushed in. She did.
Once inside, she became fidgety and shaky again, staring at her shoes, and her fingers fooled around with the edges of her deep grey blouse. She sensed gazes on her. They felt hot on her skin, like in the nude-in-high-school dream sequence. Reluctantly, she lifted her eyes and cast a tentative look around. It was bright, far too bright, and her hand went instinctively to her eyes. She now began making out shapes. Aisle after aisle sat like expectant students, their faces turned towards her, each face telling a different story. “Aisle 3B: Sanitations”, said the narrow green one in the front. A broad and low brown one at the back claimed, “Aisle 5A: Paint”. A small prim pink one near the left end coyly admitted, “Aisle 1A: Luxury”. Others similarly attired chimed in, and her eyes burned with the noise. For the next moment or so, she contemplated turning back and running out the way she came in. But before she could make up her mind, a honeyed voice cooed from somewhere amongst the plastic flora.
“Rrrrring !! Rrrrring !!”
She dropped the withered pale letter into a vase on the mantle, and lifted the phone off the hook. “Heyy, sweetie, G’morning. He left a letter for you before he left. It had been in the mailbox for sometime. I had the gardener drop it off at your door. Did you get it ?”
She looked at the vase. It was a crusty clay thing shaped like a mermaid.
“Yeah.”
“That’s gweat, Miss! How menny uf these shall I pack fer you ?!”
“Huh ?!”
“How menny, Miss ?”
A petite blonde with a jarring lip gloss and a blue and white toothpasty apron stood in front of her, holding oddly shaped objects of different colors in her arms, cradling them like babies. She thought they looked more like toys, in some parallel universe she didn’t understand, and the woman looked like a disgruntled kid, looking for someone to play with her.
“I don’t wanna play, ummm, I mean, buy those. Do you mind if I look around some more?”
“Suwwwiee.”
She shuffled on, her foot steps the only noise in the whole store. She walked through rows of aisles filled with plastic uselessness, foam filled inanities. They didn’t make any sense. She held her temples, and tried to figure out uses these objects could be put to. The aisle seemed a mile long and, as far as she could see, was filled with these insanely colorful oddities. She switched aisles, but it felt no different a neighborhood, with an orgy of colors and an overwhelming stupidity of shapes from one end to the other, without respite. Her eyes started to hurt again, her brain refused focus, and she felt herself corroding under the cheerfully virulent gaze from the aisles. Her pulse quickened, and she began to panic. The lip gloss woman called out to her again.
“Scream ! Scream your cunt out, you lousy bitch!”
She opened her mouth to scream. Someone else beat her to it.
“Fuck her, Danny! Fuck her kidneys to pieces!”
“Fuck her!”
“Fuck her!”
“Fuck her!”
She heard someone laugh in the background. Her brow felt hot and cold at the same time. She couldn’t bear the pain in the color, the smell of the polymer, the weight of the refrigerated air. She looked around, for something that would soothe her eyes, something black, something gray. Bright green hit her from the left. Orange from the right. A fountain of shiny red burst from her mouth.
“Fuck her! Fuck her! Fuck her!”
She remembered she wore black and gray. She looked down. She saw bare flesh.
She was in high school. Everyone was looking at her.
She was in a pale blue van. She was being raped.
It began to rain.
As she walked out of the glass door of the greatest superstore in the Twin Cities, she seemed scaringly sure to herself. Her light hair sloped down her forehead in hair colored channels, and water ran down along those in trickles, and, as she fumbled for the keys, she remembered something he had once said.
“Before it falls, it’s a cloud, and afterwards, it’s just muddy water running down street drains. When it’s falling on your face, when you get wet, is when you call it rain.”
She smiled. And drove off. And all that was left of her visit to the greatest superstore in the Twin Cities was a bunch of hundred dollar bills wrapped in a pale yellow blank paper, lying in the mud.
*Footnote: Crap! Crap! Crap
