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What We Hold Sacred
Clara and I are walking down an isle in Shoe Plus when a girl in a tan skirt and red shirt,
name-tag precisely fitted, approaches us, her wide Shoe Plus smile enlivening my existence.
“Can I help you today?” the girl asks Clara. Clara says something about a sandal shoe
that she’s spotted in a magazine ad, asking if this store carries it, and I’m praying
the sales girl will lean forward so that I can evaluate her cleavage.
After a few minutes of them talking about shoes – and I mean competition
talking about these shoes and those shoes, big shoes and small shoes, sandals
here and sandals there, sandals with flaps and sandals without flaps, even sandals
sporting big heels which I’d never let Clara wear in a million years – my brain teeters
on thoughts of suicide . The Shoe Plus girl never leans or bends far enough for her
cleavage to welcome me in. All in all, I’m stuck in damn purgatory while the girl,
who is at least a decade older than Clara, treats Clara like a sister.
Someone please throw me a bone! Divine intervention is fine.
The girl now pulls out a special shoe box and unveils the contents to Sara like a waiter
removing the lid from a dinner plate and as soon as Clara sees the goods, her face bubbles with excitement.
“Daddy, can you get these for me?”
I say something that that must have seemed like yes because Clara quickly hugs me,
her head contacting my chest briefly, then fumbles the lid across the shoe-box
and follows the girl to the register abandoning any further interaction with me.
I’m dumbfounded as to how I should feel about letting Clara get her way.
On the one hand, I like seeing her happy and I don’t mind buying her stuff,
but on the other, I feel like a piece of meat.
As I start my inevitable pilgrimage to the counter, I straighten my back and reach into my pocket
and pull out my wallet and find my MasterCard and smile for old-times sake before wielding the thing.
After the purchase, Clara is ecstatic and bouncing off the walls. “Let’s go to the Gap”
she says and she is already aimed and walking in that direction, her bag swinging like
a pendulum, when I decide that Daddy needs a break.
“Go on, Clara, I’ll meet you there,” I yell, realizing that she probably doesn’t care.
However, she suddenly stops in the middle of the mall then does an about-face.
“Do not wait outside like last time,” she proclaims. Clara then spins around and jets into the store.
For a second, I wonder how many are watching us and are laughing at the sight of such a little girl making demands.
With time to kill, I divert my attention to ice-cream. I wait in line at a tiny ice-cream hut where
there is this huge lady standing next to me looking at the menu. She looks like she got ass-implants,
but not regular ones, some experimental kind that went bad and ballooned up to 4 feet each.
Her face, a tiny acorn, barely visible, swivels and elevates like a robot as it scans the menu,
and the thing is that I’m looking at this truck of a woman and trying my best to imagine her
as being hot and I’m giving it my best efforts but my best efforts are failing miserably and
I don’t even think I could have sex with her for a million dollars. The best I can I come
up with is that I might watch a porn with her in it but it would have to be one where she
is stuffing her face with ice cream. Shit, that does sound a bit wacky, but I’ve seen
crazier feats performed on a XXX tape I found at a nursing home.
“We’re out of Blueberry Crunch,” the cashier says. The casher is a lady, probably sixteen, first job,
wearing a red cap and a nose ring. I’ve seen lots of girls like her, especially roaming the mall,
and they all have no respect for adults. I mean its common knowledge, and even spelled out in Webster’s
Dictionary, that these girls give blow-jobs to undeserving idiot-boyfriends whose acnky-riddled faces and
Honda civics belong in a zoo.
“I’ll take the cherry popper,” I say.
“What, we don’t have-.”
“Of course you don’t.”
She doesn’t understand this joke and at first I don’t care but then after a minute
I feel like I should say something for atonement but I can’t. She offers
some other treats – though not as delectable as the cherry popper – and in the end,
I buy some nutty-butty looking ice-cream bar that melts down my hand faster than I can lick.
I sit down near a water fountain and watch the water jump high and I mull over the moral wasteland we
call America, where good ice-cream and good head are rare commodities, and where the only salvation
we have is believing that there is something somewhere that we hold sacred.
I head back to the GAP to pick up Clara. I’m hoping to drop her at a babysitters
so I can go out tonight. Lance has the night off and maybe we can hit up a couple
bars and pick up some girls who can tell us stuff about themselves that I won’t
dismiss as insignificant.
I wait outside for a few minutes, but Clara doesn’t emerge. My Penetration
of this store appears imminent.
The music is pumping and the lights are dimmed and I smell a perfume mist in the air. I target
the back of the store and head in that direction because the dressing rooms are there and maybe
I can peep some legs. Even if Clara sees me, I don’t care because she should know what kind of person I am anyway.
I spot a pair of legs in the bottom of a dressing room and I bend over and let my eyes do the rest.
The legs, two smooth shiny heaven-sent legs – as perfect as McDonald’s French fries, are accentuated
by a pair of ridiculously steep heels.
The door to the dressing room swings open and Clara struts out, nearly bumping me.
I look up. She is smiling a weird, oblong smile suggesting that she knew that
someone was watching her and that she wanted them to see her.
“Dad-”
“Darling, I’m so sorry, uh, I thought someone else was here.”
There is this brief moment, like I’m in slow motion, when I consider the possibility
that there is nothing sacred in this world, that everything true is defiled and
that I’m one notch from proving its validity but then I have to tell myself that
I am a normal person and a normal person can’t be fooled.
“Can I get these heels?” are the only words out of her mouth.
Jake Kinzie is on a mission to free the quirky, deviant, sometimes
crazy ideas that lurk inside him itching to be heard. Writing is their channel
to existence and publication is their pathway to eventual freedom. Some of his
stuff has recently been spotted at Nuvein.com and WordRiot.org.
Email: Jake Kinzie
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