My last purchase

Flash fiction with a nod to https://substack.com/@contarini1

There it is: the last scrap I own from Mohawk Mall, sold to me by a barbarous and unrelenting voluptuary bookseller on the first floor with few visitors.  At first, he was all smiles and glad-handed salesmanship on the outside. No, he was not like the driver of the Buick, who wanted to skim his hands over your groin. I encounter him too while waiting for you and your then-just girlfriend to get off from McDonald’s.  Nasty pieces of work, both.

But the salesman wanted a more pure form of deceit, getting you to read the books that set him free. Of course, there was sexuality in the phrases and then he could have someone to talk to about the lilted happenstance in these dirty sidelines, such as V.S. Naipaul talking about the words that no one else had read since Shakespeare while writing of anal intercourse at a bend in the river.  I could see him picture the character perhaps painted on the wall looking as if she were alive.  Perhaps he called that piece of wonder, then. A fermata in prose.

He was disappointed that day because I read the entire book that he sold, and found little to amuse myself and nothing to abuse myself.  And he knew that the moment I turned to the last pages and quickly read the meat of his delight. All smiles stopped together.

So, that is what I remember from Mohawk Mall before they leveled the sad concrete block and put up separate stores.