The Gift- Draft 1

When she walked through the doors of the cookie cutter Wal-mart, she is inundated by many senses. The smell of the bakery, the ozone emitted by the coolers, the grease of the far-off automotive section. Blinking away the darkness created by leaving the sun so quickly for a fluorescent fueled world, her vision finally clears to reaveal the bustling of old, wirey-bearded men, child-laden single mothers, and bustling workers in their Smurf colored vests. When her seneses finally settle, though, it is the thoughts of all the people that continue to batter her own inner self. Some days, Pam is able to handle the worry-speak of the people around her, but it is places like this that make the gift hard to bear.
She turned her cart and handed it back to the quiet, glad-eyed greeter. She couldn’t leave, the items she needed to buy were vital to the celebrations planned at school the following day, and in such a small town, this was the only place to buy them at a reasonable price. She took a deep breath and wove her way through crowd to the less crowded McDonald’s in the story. Surely, this would be a safe place with meals that are “Happy” and a ketchup haired clown. There weren’t as many people in there and a majority of them were children anyways.
She pulled up a chair and sat at the purple and blue speckled Formica table. Clutching her head in her hands, fingers tangled in hair, she tried to erase what she had heard in the last 2 minutes. As she drowned out the noises with deep breathing exercises, she heard a frail voice cut through the muddy mess churning in the background. “Roger,” it sighed, “remember when we used to walk to the corner store for sugar and flour on Saturdays. I can still feel you sneak up behind me in the kitchen later in the afternoons in order to wrap your arms around my apron-covered waist. Oh, how I hated the interruption to my baking routing, but in fact, that was part of the routine. I miss our routine.” After hearing this conversation, Pam slowly raised her head up and let the sandy strands of hair fall from her fingertips. She glanced around, so as to not be too obvious to the crowd. Again, she saw the single mom with children hanging off of her spaghetti straps. “No,” she thought, “The only place she walks to is to the bus stop.” She saw a middle aged woman in Cherokee jeans staring up at the menu board, avoiding eye contact, but for some other reason. There wasn’t a couple in this place, mostly women, and one man in a trucker hat sitting by himself in a corner. Finally, her eyes settled on the woman cradling her cup of coffee, her salt and pepper hair pulled back into a bun. This Strega Nona look-alike looked oddly out of place in a Wal-Mart. Surely she was the type to walk to the store. She was the one with the once in a lifetime, fairy tale love who would cradle her in the kitchen. Pam got up from the table, grabbing a straw wrapper that had been left by some milkshake toting teen before her. As she walked towards Strega Nona, she inhaled deeply and was ready to sidle up beside her. At the last second, she made a slight turn to the right, slammed the wrapper in the trash, and hurried out the sliding glass doors, being sucked out of the airconditioned 21st century biome back into the sunlight. “Nope,” she said shaking her head and walking, no running away in the hopes of erasing the noise once again, “not ready.”