Church Shopping: An Update to a Work in Progress
Twelve of Maude’s cigarette breaks later, the store had seen eight customers, four of them bought “My Kid is a Georgia Bulldawg” bumper stickers and said some version of “Oh what a bargain” as Claire rang them up, three who thought it was an antique place and bought a bag of five for a dollar, crookless, candy canes to make it seem like they came in with the sole intention of buying cheap flavored sugar, and one Ruby Joiner who came in a few times every month to visit her last surviving friend and to see if they’d received any new miniature houses, barns, or shops, which, when she purchased a new one, she would take home and shellack the roof with acrylic snow, affix glass icicles to ledges, frost every pane of every window, and then find a place for it in her forever frozen winter village where faceless children, pulled along by hidden magnets, skated in circles times infinity and never made a dent in the mirrored pond and there were cars iced permanently into their spaces at the local diner and, if you crouched down to the eye level of an average seven-year-old, you’d be able to look through the glass-fronted diner and see a man in a red-plaid shirt, maybe the semi-truck outside belongs to him, and he’d be holding a coffee cup a few millimeters from his face and if you leaned in close enough to where the tops of the frosted bushes grazed your chin you would see that the coffee cup is empty except for a gnat who crawled in there to die a few days after Ruby first installed the town’s only public eatery.
Note from the author: one of my goals in this piece is to linger, to stay in a moment so long that it makes the reader feel slightly awkward, to magnify something to an extreme point. This is a miniature, pun-intended, of one of those moments. Feedback welcome. Thanks for reading.
