The aisles are twenty rows tall. The wonderful candy store has these licorice, sour worms, taffy, and rope gummy tied in double knots along each one another and dangling between the expanses like fat chains in a chain-link. A concrete fountain in the center of the visible expanse of the store pours onto its base, from three positions off its central spire, unbroken streams of water.
The girl runs past the fountain and around the corner of the first aisles, and more things pack these next parallel aisles, hidden behind the flickering faces of mothers, fathers, and shopping carts. She keeps to eye level, aisle two. Past assortments of gumballs, packs of chocolates coated in other chocolates, exciting varieties again of lumpy, sugary things, the girl smiles. She singles out a white-label, middling candy bar behind some rubber bouncy balls and plastic triceratops and then scoops it out from the recesses. She skips back, glazing over the description of the Supreme-choc-something-or-another she's picked out, bouncing her eyes to that flickering light in the tall ceiling out of all the other lights. She brushes the shoulder of a larger man, and she apologizes to the fountain, "I didn't mean to."
The lanes of the cash registers have these people with ribbons tied to their back, and every ribbon has one or two balloons. A balloon crackles strange, fuzzy noises with the florescent light above her head in one such aisle. The balloon also has no person to be stuck to, and the checkout is clear of anyone. The register and the scanner are a collective unit with a touch screen as inviting as a phone game on her mother's phone, cycling rainbows and yellow bubbles at its corners. The girl puts her candy bar on the platform under the screen, and she taps to confirm an order a couple times before it registers with the machine. The machine says something like, "Please scan your items," and the girl waves the candy bar over the dark glass like how the miserable people do it—she pouts. It scans, and the monitor fills with white—an error: "Unexpected item."
"What?" she giggles. Clicking out of it doesn't do anything, neither does putting the candy in the ugly bag. The balloon above rubs against its yellow light, pitchy to unworn ears. So the girl groans, searching for a face to groan at and tell about her awful experience with the cash register you can use yourself, but she figures out there's a button to call for help for nincompoops, so she does that and leans against the pole holding the aisle number with her mouth open and her eyes shut. By the time an employee arrives, she lies on the ground, the back of her head planted against the last set of washers and nails in the pole. She stands and, with the leftover sting of the nail, retrieves the candy bar for the employee. He's another of those miserable ones mom mentions—his nametag is facing backwards, and he doesn't get a balloon like the other employees. He says, "Well, let me scan it." He sighs, and the balloon above their head pops. "It's not an item we stock."
"But—but it was on that aisle." She points to where the aisle would be if it weren't for the aisle in front of it.
"Nope. I don't know how you found this." He puts away his scanning wand. He then apologizes for having to pocket her candy. He calls her sweetie.
The candy was alone, though. That's why she picked it. The others are in cardboard, twenty a box. "I want this one." She bites her lip and meanders beside his pocket.
He says, "You can't. It could be poisoned with, like, rat poison or something. It might taste bad, I mean." He fidgets out of the aisle and kicks some exploded balloon chunks under the side of it.
It's another lecture at eleven at night, when she can't close her eyes and her stomach hurts. So she resolves that she owns the candy—that she brought it into the store. Yes, she owns it—no, they didn't own it. She's sorry she bothered him. Candy is a commodity and not a reason to come to this stupid place.
So the girl squints at the sun, clutches her smudged label of chocolate, and leaves the employee and the warehouse store of commercial goods. She stumbles out of the way of an overweight woman and the shopping cart with the woman's daughter in it. Under the huge orange letters facing the parking lot, the roar of shopping carts drowns the fountain.
END