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I had deviled the salads for far too long when the clock struck negative one. A perplexing complex of half octave nog ran amuck in the rosary room where the group had gathered to monotonously pray to a virgin. The egg sandwich shop across the street was blazing orange, and the sign outside depicted a large egg sandwich being held by a cloppity balding man with a big smile on his face.

It was ass class of the fiercest kind and with the help of devil’s lettuce in a wizard-shaped bong, my mind went taffy nuts, and I was exiled to the stratosphere of love and lust. I ended up at the record store on the tumble-weeded east side of town, and I was mindlessly flipping through the albums while Audioslave blared overhead. The place smelled of pot and glass and warm skin. The clerkies all had dyed hair and tattoos and face piercings. To each his own. Live your life. Let people be who they want to be without standing on their necks or defiling their liberties. That’s true freedom… to live as one truly is. Fuck the battle cry of hypocrisy. Fuck the battle cry of those who want to force their beliefs and so-called values on others. Mind your own fucking business.

After the record store I went to the deserted mall called The Citadel. There’s a chain-link fence all around it, but there are ways to get in.

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And now I sit with the mannequins in the subversive shadows of an abandoned JC Penney store. The spinning dials that were their eyes brought me to the ashen dais to trumpet brokenheartedly that the chrysanthemums are falling from the sky, entangled in iron works, and pressed against the youthful angst of chalk hearts on brickyard walls. Now they melt in the summer sun, the colors drip like the blood of love.

They say nothing. The hollow air sits silently. The mannequins are motionless, emotionless… On the outside. But on the inside they feel everything we do. We the people. Struggling to survive in this sick, divisive world. At night they wander the ancient corridors of the once thriving mall. Their eyes ignite to light the way through the dust and debris and emptiness. This once buzzing temple of products, this grand basilica of consumerism is now gutted and void and those that once devoured the useless are ghosts.

I follow behind the well-oiled mannequins but am reluctant to be part of the group. They’re so odd and seemingly fictitious. The way they move though, it seems as if they are searching for something. Like midnight champagne goblins they are, sparkling green and full of tricks. But what would an obsolete, naked, plastic-skinned small herd of mannequins be searching for in a defunct shopping mall? Their clothes? Their souls? My body?

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I fall asleep in the gathering rotunda of planters and benches tattooed with the memory of endless asses. The silent, motionless escalators lurch upward. A few hours later the sun cracks through the skylights. Now the mannequins have scattered to return to their places where they pose. I rise like the dead and my bones creak. All is quiet and still. Only the dust dances in the dawn, stirred up from last night’s activity and now slow to settle.  

I stand and wonder if I had died and this is my afterlife. I turn west and walk toward the food court. It’s a dead hive of geometric cut-outs where they used to serve food from. Somehow the smell lingers. All those entwined scents of different kinds of cooking by captured hands. I glance upward to where the video store used to be across the way. I recall falling down in there or was it but a neon dream. Walls of film. Loud sounds.

The loneliness begins to take hold. Hollow howls spin like turbines through the air. Is something coming to get me at last? Am I ready to die again? No. I don’t ever want to die again. I want to go on and live in the ancient mall and go outside once in a while to look at the titanium sky and there I will wonder where it all went… My time, my life, my love.