The lights are bright like a dentist’s headlamp and the cash registers, even from dead-bolted doors sixty yards off, flicker blue dots. Lost in his baseball cap, a lanky teen swabs the floor in clipped circles. The morbidly obese manager, whose entire black shirt is splattered with oil and condiments, stands next to the boy like an exhausted, surrogate mother.
When she mouths that word, it’s an insult. You slump forward and realize there are two clocks: the one based off Greenwich Mean Time and the one each of us carries in our bones, tissues, and muscles. The second clock calibrates to the first, but each second clock is distorted by individual will and circumstance.
When I say “clock,” it is an arbitrary symbol. You want food; the manager wants sleep; the franchise supports her timeline. Your country wants the Euro; Germany wants to keep the Mark; all of Europe tells Germany it must relinquish its currency. There is always a governing body; only its face changes depending on the light.
You slowly circle the desolate strip mall and stare out the passenger window. The lights in the parking lot shine into each store’s blackness: Indonesian clay pots, unborn croissants, perfect rows of softball bats. Banal and undesired in the daytime, in the face of fast-food rejection, these common objects become glamorized, micro-second fantasies. You want something.
Barthes argues that the American striptease loses its social potency and public moral contradiction when the performer’s seduction ceases and the body is bared. What happens if the collective gaze remains and the performer, center-stage, is still as a bronzed statue? Something baser emerges, an unconsidered cruelty. Her shift lasts two more hours. Your wallet is bursting with ones.
[...] I have a micro essay on the notion of a closed sign at 300 Reviews. It’s tied heavily to U of AL, but encourage, encourage everyone to try [...]