Prompt: Exploring a Home place through white space.
- Write a paragraph about a place from childhood that you know well, and to which you have attached emotional significance.
- Insert five explanatory footnotes at the parts with the most “heat”.
- Just read the footnotes.
Plastic strips separated the blocks of frozen steaks from the shoppers in the aisle, and when hands parted them like beaded curtains [1], the clanking of meat against itself sounded like building blocks toppling over. Down the middle aisles were everything a person in Madison County, Virginia might need from their general store (without having to drive all the way to the A&P up in Madison, proper) but around the edges lived the good stuff. Big League Chew [2] in the shadow of actual chew. Magazines, candy, King-sized candy, a display case of knives [3], a display case of Zippos, 8-tracks behind a sliding glass partition. Ladies who looked like they grew up behind the cash register who could find the switch to turn on the conveyor belt with a bullseye toe in the dark [4] . A display case of small boxes with women on them and names like Rough Rider [5], Lifestyles and Trojan-Enz; no plastic strips in front of them, just an invisible thing on the other end of an uncomfortable question.
[1] In the mid-eighties’ neon charge towards the future, my rural corners of the world swirled with the dying eddies of things soon to be outdated.
[2] Fake tobacco, in the form of bubble gum in this case, was a slam dunk of appeal and edginess. What adult could say shit to a kid unafraid to mow down a handful of provocation like that?
[3] The knife case was meant to turn, to allure and tease with the dawning and dusking of new lockbacks as they rotated at the height of an adult head. But since it was stuck, you had to walk around it like the Washington Monument to look at all the knives on each side.
[4] The toes that pinpointed the conveyor belt down there in the dark were either encased in a practical shoe, or exposed with nail polish out of the end of a sandal that you know left a red mark when she took it off. You never knew. All this happening unseen like drum pedals while the arrhythmic beep of the scanner dared an ear to make sense of it.
[5] “Rough Riders” were the first U.S. Volunteer Cavalry under Teddy Roosevelt. I looked this up in a dictionary, which caused me great confusion. When I asked my mom what they were, pointing at the shelf with that brand of them, her reply was “condoms.” Under the hum of the fluorescent lights and the eye of the cashier ladies I paused my very logical next question. Much later, while confused how Teddy Roosevelt and the girl on the box of Rough Riders and my purely foundational understanding of sexual reproduction all mashed into the day’s events, I asked about condoms while being tucked in. My mother, being a public health nurse, was never shy about answering these kinds of questions — encouraged it, in fact — and told me that condoms were to prevent a man and a woman from having a baby when they had sex. Right there, on the edge of sleep, I hurtled to the other side of the galaxy with my mind blown. I had been secure in my understanding of our reproductive system — it was disgusting grenade we humans reluctantly had to fall on for the survival of our species, after all. But to learn in one breath that there were people who engaged in this activity? Willingly? And after all that mess, to not even to make a baby?
No.
Dave Gentry 