Walmart

Today’s Flash Fiction prompt was to write about a sign. I failed on the prompt but I’m not as disgusted with the piece as I have been with most of my work this last week. What do y’all think?

Limping through Walmart, my loose sock sliding down inside my treadbare shoe, all I could think of was how much I missed my saltwater swimming pool and suburban ignorance.  

Walmart was full of people I was afraid I was becoming as I began our new life, and all I wanted was to see myself crossing under the bright red exit sign, back to my old self.

But alas, my youngest teenager needed supplies for a school fundraiser, and so, I grudgingly followed her on her quest for popularity through the purchase of paper plates, markers, tissue paper and candy.

”Look, Mama!” Remember when I used to have a toy tunnel like that?  Oh yes, I remembered her getting stuck to her sister  in the pop up catastrophe because she had been eating peanut butter and jelly and was moving so damn fast that I could not get her hands cleaned before she decided to play toddler Survivor.  I can still her barely older sister’s godforsaken wails: “bad sistuh, bad bad bad sistuh…Mamamama helllll meeeeeeee.”

Then there was the etch-a-sketch that she had to stop and visit.  She has this gift of being able to actually draw something recognizable on an Etch-A-Sketch.  She left a drawing of a beach and dolphins for the next shopper to shake into a prehistoric reboot.

The pale green maternal rocking chair with a built in footstool  beckoned us to the baby section and we both jumped in and crash landed in it together in an unenviable disarray of limbs that in no way resembled how normal people sit in a chair.  
“Can I fix my sock, please?” I plaintively asked my daughter, who was vying for first rights to the chair.  “Ok. Oh, look there’s Sandra Boynton Board Books! I’ll BRB,” and she was off and running, ginger ponytail bouncing down her back.

Sock temporarily re-covers heel; child sits on my lap with a pile that includes “Moo, Baaa, La La La,” and “The Going To Bed Book.”  She nestles in the crook of my right elbow, sucking on a bottle of warm milk and points to a cow.  “Moo” we say together, and then we fall into our ritual of me reading (reciting - I memorized all the Boynton Board Books with child number 1) words and her making the animal sounds.  As per usual, we read that story twice, then moved on to “The Going to Bed Book.”  By the 4th page, her eyes were closed; after the next page, mine were, too.

Daddy came in to gently remove her from my arms to place her in the crib, being sure she was holding on to Teddy Wynken, sucking Binkie Blynken and resting on Nod, the miniature pillow in the pastel paisley case.  Then, he helped me up and I limped off to bed, with an odd sensation that there was a sock sliding down inside my shoe.