Thu, 19 May 2005

Pushwise
Over the years, people had fit coins into the cracks in the walls. Supposedly this was offerings to whatever god watched over those twelve people who walked out of the rubble when the roof collapsed, the whole far side given way under the water-weight without one casualty. The bottom of the wall is lined with chalk drawings, names of child artists and those in need of divinity. Each prior owner’s coat of paint scraped back over neglect and age to show palimpsests of ads and signs. It’s local tradition that nobody pulls the change out because the change is the only thing holding the wall up. There’s always talk some store will move into the remaining half of the building, the part still standing, but it never happens. There’s rain-washed fragments of hopscotch and four-square fields out among the yellow parking slots, the abandoned cars pushed to the far end and waiting to get towed. kamikaze’d kites up in the power lines, lost superballs in the gravel of the roof. Patron of children, and of children’s games, any god who watches this place. They entered through the garbage chute, which once had been wedged shut with a broomhandle but that had broken on repeated shoves. The lighting was out, but the moon through the holes in the ceiling shone of the linoleum and the chrome of the shelves. They spread out over the remains, through the rubble, careful not to disturb anything without worth. There were a rack of untouched gumball machines, which were pulled up from the tubing rack and hustled out back through the chute. One of them found a meat cleaver stuck in a cutting board, back in the meat department. Unlabeled cans were taken to be used as objects for window-breaking later, and two mop handles were taken to be used as weapons, should the recon mission be discovered. One of the girls was scouting for parts to build a drum from, or at least she had explained it as a drum; she called it a gamelan. Others found a satisfaction from arranging into patterns and systematically combing the store. One boy spent the entire time dismantling a coffee-grinder. At the ten minute sign, one of the children whistled and the lot of them flew back to the chute, which they climbed into and through, hauling the taking out in carts and wagons. As they were leaving, the drum-girl walked to the wall and reached up, tip-toe, and pulled a coin out of the wall. An X had been carved over the president’s image on the front. She listened, waited, then shoved the coin back in its crack, running off with the others, off and away.

The first ever Food King was build in 1935ish (my father told me, a man who felt no need for statistical accuracy as long as the basic timeline held), just down the street from my folk’s house. At the time, the local grocery stores all had local butchers, and all the meat was brought in from local farms, which meant your selection of meats was dependent on local conditions. Refrigerated railroad cars were not a new invention, but had yet to be brought en masse to the area, and with them came a selection of downright exotic meats, which is where the logo “We Are The Meat People” supposedly sprung from. It was just in front of this very Meat Department, in the world’s first Food King, where my father taught my mother how to waltz. These are the same floors where Jimmy Cheerios’s father developed his mop technique, the same floors where Ana Skyfish was born. It’s where I was working up until two months ago, employment which was terminated after I found with my boss over bounced pay checks and broken equipment, nothing interesting. But at nights, when I was locked inside, I used to sit on the back desk, in the Customer Service nook, and fixate on what a center of personal history this place was, is. All the fiction has roots in real geography, and if you wanted, I could drive you around one night and show you where everything would be, were it real. Regional Writer, indeed. All week I’ve been having what I call “glacier days”: the feeling that huge events towering over me are taking shape in the dark spaces between stars, shifting and grinding, too large to even see, much less comprehend. This always happens when I reenter social circles, and to an extent I saw it coming. As well, getting closer to finishing up the book, large pieces of my life are falling into place. But there is something else, something I can neither see nor touch, and it has me worried, worried enough that I’m shoving change in the cracks of buildings to feel like I’ve left something in this world.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #