As I Lay Buying

AS I LAY BUYING

BY MARCO KAYE

DARL 

 Jewel and I come up onto Macy’s fifth floor. We cannot find a present for Pa and we are in bed and bath and lost. The beds look like shorn sheep with their hooves tucked under, heads bowed, prayerful before the slaughter bleeds brown eyes black. Fluorescents burn and hum with terrible impatience.

Deepening by safety elevator to men’s basics, Jewel stares straight ahead, his pale eyes glinting like plastic set into his hard plastic face. The elevator chimes. Jewel crosses the floor in eight strides with the rigid gravity of a mannequin dressed in a herringbone suit and endued with life from the waist down. Then he’s gone.

Revolving doors tuck Jewel back into the city’s wrenching noise, a pair of socks, angry with Atlanta Falcon, tongue from his back pocket.

If I knew what to get Pa I would have but I do not. The lights blur. I can smell my tears.

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