“You see the books, they are your best friend.”

What with the dank-must carpet and these pissed-upon trial rooms, with the rows of discarded garments from those rows of all the same tiny houses. So tightly packed that they fall off the hanger and do not reach the trod upon foul floor.
Nothing here reeks of its previous life, as the shoppers are mostly far too dull to think beyond their own. These once freshly pressed products purchased by people wanting to create themselves, as free agents (albeit unknowingly enslaved to the whims of their pathological consumption).
They cannot stop that their saturday soccor trophies will tarnish and that their poly-blend polar-fleece sloppy-joes will ball up.
They cannot stop to realize if ever there was value, the where and the why and the how of it.
But, if it’s no longer wanted (because it never was needed) then they can feel good about themselves by giving it to charity.

It’s different when I approach the bookshelves though. Yes, we have Foetal Attraction, the bibbles that Gideon keeps leaving in random places (hospital rooms, school rooms, waiting rooms, changing rooms) Bridget Jones’s own personal diary, celebrity gossip rags from the late nineties, microwave cooking guides, the Atkins diet revolution.

“You see the books, they are your best friend.”

But we have this boy.

The boy was chubby and his barely joined hare lip glistened with mucous. His father was dressed well, not sharply, but wisely, in browns of varying textures. His accent, as he said it, was thick, but his tone, so gentle.
The boy’s eyes, behind he coke bottle thick glasses, one was of the darkest brown, the other, not seeing, of grey pearlescence.

I saw him later in the store whimpering between the racks of clothes; the Kramer shirts and the Lad shirts, the women’s jumpers and the women’s skirts.

“Daddy, where are you?”