MC&G #005: On Convenience Stores

Written last. Unproofed.

The convenience store was a shining palace, a beautiful burning flame of white fluorescence that Kasper mindlessly shuffled towards. Outside its peaceful glass doors, two wizened men with the facial hair of academics, bushy and unkempt, begged for spare change, which they would then use for state lottery scratch tickets. Kasper thought them brilliant, you’d have to be a fool to blow your own money on that crapshoot, and he gave them each half a handful of change. In return, they looked at him with something that might have been respect and the one on the left opened the door. There was a line of myrmidons waiting for cigarettes at the front and a pair of drunken angels with purposely ripped stockings asking where they could find the chips; unfortunately the milk cartons wouldn’t answer. An array of racked magazines that all looked the same had jumped the gun and reviewed the year before it ended, their wonderful prophecies now sitting ducks, and today’s newspapers were now bundled up next to them, their news already expired. There were a dozen ice cream novelties waiting lonely at the bottom of a freezer, which wheezed all winter long, and beside that a counter top filled with coffee urns and covered in a thin layer of spilled sugar and substitute.