stiff suits." The tallest Dad was in a way overly starched shirt and boxers and dress socks with little steaps. Nobody'd wanted to get dressed up except his wife. "That's why we gotta do this." He snagged the three-corner hat from the bed and put it on again. Since hanging out with the writer of the Christmas poem he'd been coming up with "meaning" to the hat.
"What do you think it means?" He started asking other people as part of his assertion that he was not. "Not what?" An older daughter asked. The elevator stifled the echoey sound voices can have in big open spaces. "Not too self-absorbed to be a journalist." The daughter considered all that was being said. And which woman in his life may have been too harsh. He got out after pecking a cheek and looking in eyes to center in a lot of commotion.
"He seems less sad."
"Everybody thinks they know him."
"And, a lot of people rely on him to come up with ways to, I don't know, break through I guess the oppression of the grind."
"The oppression of the grind. I like that. Can I use it?"
"Poem or some other piece?"
"Maybe a song."
"Cool."
"Maybe not."
Some floor stops had people, some did not. Stopping at each one dragged out free time from event-ing.
"I want it to be like that." The woman was drinking tea with honey and no alcohol. She actually wanted to know about our experiences. Another woman asked our friend from Jerusalem if the sore-throated woman had influenced peoples' hair color choices. The man looked at all the blondes in the room and considered all the facts he knew about the people. He put facts together with feeling the vibe. After some kids explained in great detail the ways in which they'd managed to not lose their grownups even in the Crazy Crossings, the man said, "My feeling is that at least half of these blondes are PRETENDERS." The words seemed to come out in slow motion the way dreadful things often seem to happen.
One girl gasped at the accusation-sounding determination. Some little girls gasped too. Head scarves were plucked and pulled from just put out inventory. "Now they judging our hair." A man took the cap off a flask, but smelled the coffee and smiled, and put the cap back on. "It's pretty." One boy popped up from behind a lot of hanging alligators on sticks and judged. "They're coming!" Another boy reported of hearing heels on floor coming closer.
"Where's..." The woman stopped herself short of automatically finding her husband. She just made up or fibbed through the last of the sentence, a question word hung in the air until she finished. "Where's the brochures gonna go?" She walked her "million dollar legs" back to outside the doors of the shop. "A friend" had lashed the box of brochures and inserts with a bunjee cord to a broken suitcase whose wheels still worked.
"Can I have it?" A tween asked the woman. She barely made a face at sweaty-smelling teenager. "Have what?"
"That." The tween pointed with a sneakered foot at the bunjee cord. "We'll see if you've been behaving yourself."
A teenage girl whispered an update of while you were gone into the woman's ear. She narrowed an eye at a potential disturbing the peace and asked, "Just what are they pretending?"
"Wish I knew."
She started to rack brochures. "Don't touch!" She smacked at a tween's hand. "A job well done is money in the bank." She took a step away from the rack to get perspective. Then asked, "Straight?". Walked to a side of the rack and asked, "Maybe they are pretending not to be something, no?"
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