Everyone Discovers Peace through Imagination

The police arrived shortly afterward. Everyone’s child Journey had stolen $5092 of chocolate. Everyone refused to pay. Everyone had been through this before, and everyone was tired of covering for Journey’s addiction. It did not matter that Journey was only eight or nine years old. Everyone did not have $5092 to spend on chocolate.

Journey had been trapped by a giant glass bowl. The glass bowl was full of fifty-pound chocolate bars, of which Journey had eaten at least one. The bowl was in a candy store in the Dasney Amusement Park Mall, a shopping center modeled on Disneyland that featured all the standard Dasney characters attached to various Dasney stores: the Mudhutter’s Amazing Mobile Homes, Dallas in Wunderland’s Drinking Glasses, Yellow Snow’s Lemonade Concoctions, the Wacked Witch’s Flying Cleaning Appliances.

The bowl was narrower at the top than at the sides and difficult to escape, especially when the supply of chocolate bars was low, as it was now. Patrons pointed at Journey within it. One overhaul-clad boy put his nose to the glass and snorted like a pig. Another licked the glass as if the chocolate could be consumed by osmosis. A girl in a polka-dot dress jumped in place as if she might at any moment launch into the bowl herself. A man in a plaid jacket averted his eyes, embarrassed, remembering his own past childhood transgressions involving Fruit Polygon Cereal.

Neither Journey nor everyone noticed any of this. Everyone was in love with the Internet, so computers of any sort sent her or him into a swoon, and a computer made of popsicles sent everyone into a double-swoon, since everyone was on a diet.

For Journey, the chocolate bowl was a world not unlike the animatronic John Quincy Adams Hawaiian exhibit on the other side of the mall. There, patrons were asked to forget what had been and what was possible and instead live in the moment, as if it were the real. Jump out a window and fly, the Dasney Amusement Park Mall executives in charge of bad decisions might as well have proposed. Don’t worry about what’s below.

What’s below came for Journey as a person dressed as a red-mustachioed copper put clinks on her or him. Beside Journey, a person dressed as a woman with a matronly physique read the child her or his rights in an enthusiastic sing-song voice appropriate for a picture book reader. Around Journey, Pop Rawk grenades went off as people shifted their feet trying to get a look.

Everyone was one of them.

Five thousand ninety-two dollars was a lot of money everyone did not have and a lot of lesson Journey had failed to learn. Still, this was everyone’s darling, her or his offspring, and it was difficult to watch her or him disappear into the darkness of a vehicle decorated like a paddy wagon.

Everyone thought of the Internet that she or he loved so much. It was always telling everyone to let go, that attachments were keeping everyone from what she or he wanted, which was to find the end to the novel she or he was writing, the end that was also the beginning.

Everyone thought of John Quincy Adams on the other side of the mall, of the transcendence offered in robotics.

Everyone saw Journey melt before her or him as if everyone’s darling were merely an idea conveyed through an assemblage of metal and plastic. Everyone let go.

Everyone Needs a Monument to Grieve

Journey had come upon the idea via the Internet. Journey had long regretted eating up everyone’s $5092 fortune in chocolate, and Journey wanted to make things right.

The Internet told Journey, who was only eight and thus required special care, in the highest, most condescending, and sing-song voice it could manage, that often when people do something that causes real harm, so much harm that the person or item can’t be replaced, people erect a memorial.

The Internet showed Journey photographs of cemeteries. The cemeteries featured mostly headstones. Journey liked most the cemeteries that had life-size reproductions of people and animals or fountains and pools into which one could drop one’s feet.

Journey’s favorite monument was a stone merry-go-round that rotated when one pushed on it. Said push would activate a water pump that spewed lemonade onto riders and, if one was seated at the proper height, directly into a rider’s mouth. The memorial was for a horse jockey who had died in a game of musical chairs played on saddles mounted on live horses sponsored by Minuet-Made Lemonade.

Journey decided to create a memorial to the $5092. Journey wanted to help everyone grieve for the $5092 in a healthy and productive manner.

The memorial featured fifty one-hundred-dollar bills, four twenties, a ten, and two ones. The currency was mounted atop a giant stone candy bowl, peaking out of it. The candy bowl was ten times the size of a human. Leaning up against it was a candy bar the size of a vacuum cleaner, and next to it was a life-size figurine of a child eying the candy greedily. The child was in the back seat of a car made of granite (fashioned to look like Laygos, the attachable bricks so popular with the under-ten crowd). The driver’s side door of the car was open and off its hinges so that people could curl up in the front seat when it was raining. But the focus of the monument really was the $5092, highlighted by lamps shining up from below and covered in gold plating made from the melted-down heart of a child. In fact, it was gold, which Journey had found in the back of everyone’s closet, that Journey used to pay for the memorial and for the spinner that twirled the money around atop the bowl and for the chocolate milk that came out of the top of the bowl on special occasions, special occasions such as this, the dedication, spewing down the bowl’s side like mud.

Journey stood in front of the bowl next to the candy bar, waiting for the chocolate to run down to where Journey was. The bowl was in the middle of the Dasney Amusement Park Mall. The prime location had been arranged at a discount by Sam, a friend of Journey who was acquainted with everyone and the mall.

“How do you like it?” Journey asked everyone.

Everyone was crying, no doubt, very moved.

Journey took a finger, ran it along the bowl, stuck it in her or his mouth.

Aw, chocolate!

Everyone Restarts a Diet

Everyone was getting serious about his or her diet--or was going to. Everyone had been talking with the meaning of life almost every night for two weeks, and it seemed inevitable that they would eventually meet. Everyone wanted to be ready.

The meaning of life had high standards. The meaning of life was rich. The meaning of life road on motorboats, had a docking area at the marina. The meaning of life hung out with tan and beautiful people. The meaning of life drank Popsi Cola interminably and yet did not have a gut, had in fact the abs of a model on the World Wide Web.

Everyone needed those abs. Everyone would have settled for a small tummy that fit into clothes from his or her freshman year of college. Everyone wasn’t even close. Everyone needed to start small--even just ten pounds might be enough for the meaning of life not to completely dismiss him or her.

Everyone was supposed to have started the diet after his or her wedding. Then after the first child. Then the second. Then the third. Then the fourth. Then after the spouse ran away.

Everyone switched to Handsome Cola, a diet brand. That is as far as everyone had gotten.

Everyone’s diet was going to consist of fourteen hundred calories per day maximum. Everyone was going to lose two to five pounds per week. Everyone was going to eat mounds of cottage cheese and Linkoln Log sets of carrots. Everyone was going to stick to roughage. There would be no chocolate, no hard candy, no alcohol, no buttered popcorn, no deep-fried, bread-battered chicken.

Everyone was making an adventure of food to stay motivated. Everyone sat in front of an apple sauce swamp. Inside it were celery soldiers. Everyone had a spoon to dig them out.

Outside, the dog was barking. The kids were yelling at one another about how life was unfair. The kids were very concerned about fairness. They would have made excellent public activists.

Everyone did not care about fairness. Everyone wished only that fairness worked to his or her advantage rather than disadvantage.

Everyone had told the meaning of life that he or she spent an hour at the gym each day after work. Everyone had lied. Everyone had made a narrative of lies, had sculpted an alternative lifestyle. In the unfairness everyone wished for the lies would come true as soon as they were spoken. “Today,” everyone said, “I used the elliptical machine. I used to be on a rowing team.”

“Your spouse never mentioned that,” the meaning of life said. “There are so many things about you that your spouse never told me.”

The spouse rarely talked about everyone, which meant the spouse rarely thought about everyone, was not missing everyone the way everyone was missing him or her. Everyone thought of the spouse in his or her swimsuit on a motorboat in the middle of a body of water, Popsi Cola in hand. Everyone’s heart stirred.

Everyone wanted the spouse back. Everyone was chagrined that outside of searching for the meaning of life everyone had done little these past nine months to improve him- or herself.

Everyone dove into the apple sauce, dug out a soldier, slipped the soldier into his or her mouth, and crunched. Everyone was on the way. Everyone felt better already.

A soldier had been rescued. Everyone deserved a reward. Rewards help motivation.

Everyone stood, went to the refrigerator, grabbed a Handsome Cola, two. A chocolate bar lay on the top shelf. Everyone took that too. The chocolate belonged to everyone’s child Journey. Everyone had paid a ridiculously extravagant sum for it, $5092. Everyone deserved the chocolate bar every bit as much as Journey. It was everyone’s money.

Everyone bit the chocolate bar.

Everyone gloried in his or her diet.

Everyone Proves Seductive to the Opposite Sex

Everyone needed to know where the body had come from, what the light was that everyone had seen behind it.

The lobby was dark as everyone strode through, the security guards defunct for the night, the food in the tiny café glowing ghostily under futile display lamps. The elevator bank was dead too, a graveyard of metal upright caskets. Everyone emptied her or his security card into its beckoning slot, watched the light switch from red to green, then stepped into the elevator and requested the twelfth floor.

Everyone found the twelfth floor lighted up as if a baseball game were being played at night, fluorescents beaming so brightly across cubicles that her or his eyes hurt.

“I’ve been expecting you,” everyone’s coworker Sam said, coming to the doorway of her or his office. Sam was barefoot, a sleeping robe encasing her or his frame.

Everyone had long known of Sam’s crush on her or him, but everyone had never thought Sam sexy in the way that everyone’s spouse had been. Everyone felt embarrassed and confused. Everyone wondered whether being alone with Sam made a difference or whether everyone’s perceptions had been wrong about Sam these many months. Either way, everyone at this moment found her- or himself wanting Sam with a desperation known only to toads that mate solely one day a year.

“Come,” Sam said, summoning everyone with the turn of her or his body, the flash of skin at the back of the shins too much for everyone to resist.

Sam’s modular desk had been transformed into a bed, sheets pulled down and ready for occupation. Above them, the romantic glow of a fire titillated on the computer. Sam sat down, pulled a champagne glass and bottle from the shelf beside the bed, and poured. She or he patted the bed for everyone.

Everyone looked around. Sam handed the wine to everyone, took another glass for her- or himself, and drank.

Everyone sat. Sam placed an arm around everyone and kissed her or his cheek. Everyone flinched. Sam laughed, pulled everyone into her- or himself.

“Don’t worry,” Sam said. “Your spouse isn’t coming back.”

Everyone studied the photograph on the shelf next to the wine bottle. Everyone’s spouse stood on a motorboat at night. Lights glinted off the water. The spouse was smiling, holding a can of Popsi Cola at waist height with her or his right hand. The spouse appeared fit and tan--better than everyone remembered the spouse looking. An arm was around the spouse, the flesh of a torso. The person beside everyone’s spouse wore shades and a baseball cap. Everyone knew this person. This person gave the spouse’s life meaning.

Sam pushed everyone down on the bed, wrapped her or his body around everyone’s, kissed everyone, began taking off clothes.

“We’ve got to find Jan,” everyone heard. “Everyone’s going to be angry at us if we don’t.”

“You’re the one who insisted on running the vacuum,” Star said. Star was everyone’s second child.

“You were told to stay away from the window,” Jody, everyone’s first, said.

“I did,” Star said.

“It was Jan’s decision,” everyone’s third, Journey, proffered.

Everyone pushed her- or himself up. Sam tugged.

“The children,” everyone said.

Sam stood, pulled off her or his robe, put her or his weight against everyone, slammed everyone into the mattress.

“Our children!” Sam insisted.

Everyone Meets the Light

Everyone found no body at the base of the office building where he or she worked. Many weeks before, everyone’s coworker J. D. had fallen or jumped from the twelfth floor, where everyone’s office was. The office was for Dasney Amusement Park Malls. J. D. was the company’s designated rule maker. Some of the rules he or she had created were as follows:  

• No saving spots in line.
• No food on rides.
• No trying on bridal gowns unless you are a woman and an actual upcoming bride.
• No neighing unless you are a donkey.
• Only twelve-year-old girls may wear costume jewelry.
• Only official custodial engineers may use vacuuming equipment.

 If you wanted to create a rule but couldn’t think of one, J. D. was the person to consult.

Everyone did not care for J. D.

After his or her fall, J. D. had come to everyone through everyone’s child Journey, most specifically through Journey’s beseeching eyes, in particular Journey’s left eye.

Although everyone had had no interest in helping J. D., Journey’s eyes compelled everyone to go in search for the full truth regarding what had happened to his or her ex-coworker. Alice and a bevy of other coworkers had promised to do so, but so far as everyone was aware, no one had.

As far as everyone could tell, the sidewalk to which J. D. had fallen contained no trace of the body, not even a bloodstain in the shape of a heart where J. D.’s head would have met the pavement.

Everyone searched the chest-high bushes between the building and the sidewalk. Everyone dodged traffic along the curb, peered upward along the line of the building toward the open window from which J. D. had fallen. Everyone stared at him- or herself in the reflective windows of the all-glass building and felt a little of J. D. inside him- or herself. Everyone felt foolish.

Everyone was annoyed that J. D. had brought everyone to the office in the middle of the night, after the kids were in bed and the dog had been let out to bark. Everyone had a blog post to write, and J. D. was interfering.

Up at the opening from which J. D. had fallen was a light. Everyone had seen the office late at night many times but had never seen this light. The light was similar to one everyone had seen in movies when a person died. Everyone could not see beyond the light. The light was like a door to the sun, or to something divine, or to good food, like in a refrigerator or oven.

Everyone wondered if he or she was going to die.

A body stepped into the light of the window. It was a body like everyone’s. It looked down at everyone. And then it jumped.

Everyone Experiences Mechanical Difficulties

Everyone felt guilty about giving her or his child Journey a black eye. Everyone had given Journey the black eye because she or he had seen inside it an ex-coworker named J. D. J. D. was obsessed with budgets and rules and was something of a jerk. In Journey’s eye, J. D. was wearing a plaid coat and galoshes and was carrying an umbrella, and J. D.’s clothes were all wet.

J. D. was not known for originality. Whatever everyone did, J. D. did as well. When everyone waved, J. D. waved. When everyone ate a banana, J. D. chose to eat one then as well. J. D. was annoying.

J. D. had been wearing the plaid jacket when she or he, after falling from the twelfth floor, landed in the bushes beside the sidewalk at the bottom of the office building where everyone worked. No one had seen J. D. wear such a jacket before, so everyone and her and his coworkers were not sure if it was actually J. D.

Everyone had not been one of the people to go down to the sidewalk to check if the person who had fallen was actually J. D. and whether J. D. was wearing a plaid jacket. Alice had said that she would check, and a few others said they would go with her, but everyone could not recall anyone returning to confirm her or his findings.

Everyone suspected now that J. D.’s appearance inside Journey meant that J. D. was calling out to everyone to go to the sidewalk below the office building to look at J. D.’s body and to recover the jacket. J. D. had lost either a body or a life, and now it had become everyone’s job to find it, just as it had become everyone’s job to recover her or his spouse who had run away after finding the meaning of life. All sorts of people were asking for everyone’s help. Everyone wasn’t sure how many others J. D. had tried to reach before her or him, but everyone suspected she or he was one of the last, since everyone and J. D. were not really friends.

Everyone looked inside Journey’s black eye. Journey’s black eye looked back at everyone. J. D. waved. Everyone knew what she or he had to do.

The ride to the office was twenty-five minutes and involved many lane changes, which did not please the car, so it stopped. It did so at the point where it was supposed to enter the freeway. Already, it had been going twice as fast as any human could run, and everyone was asking it to go twice that speed. Everyone wanted too much, which was what a really good car cost. This car with peeling green paint was not that car. It was not too much. It was less than that, and thus it was fed up.

Everyone slid from the vehicle and walked around it, staring. Everyone opened the hood. Everyone could not tell the difference between a working engine and a nonworking one. A nonworking one did not have blood spurting from it the way a nonworking person would.

Everyone thought of J. D. Everyone had not seen blood spurting from J. D. because everyone had not gone down to the sidewalk to check on her and him. Thus, everyone could not be certain whether J. D. had a working body or a nonworking one.

Everyone raised her or his head. In the distance--maybe six miles--the office where J. D. and everyone worked rose like an old mother complaining about her back, which is to say it sat forward on the flat landscape as if ready to topple the way J. D. had.

Everyone Sees Something in Journey

The next time everyone saw his or her former coworker J. D., it was inside everyone’s darling child Journey. J. D. had been inside everyone for several weeks, and before that J. D. had been a coworker. Journey did not seem to everyone to be a very good darling for J. D. to reside in. J. D. was excessively rule and budget conscious, while Journey cared only about chocolate, budget be damned.

When Jeremy was inside everyone, everyone had at times felt a ping in his or her heart, as if he or she had replaced a two-hundred-year-old painting of Methuselah by an unnamed master of the medium with a half-life-sized photo of the pop star David Bowie by a third-row concertgoer or of the rapper Iggy Azalea by herself. The Methuselah painting seemed like it might be worth $5092, which everyone needed desperately for a down payment on a car, but the Bowie or Iggy photos aroused in everyone a longing for his or her spouse because Bowie’s cheeks and Iggy’s eyes looked like their child Jan’s, which in turn looked like everyone’s spouse’s. Everyone’s spouse had left him or her about six months previously.

The best child to have hosted J. D., everyone figured, would have been Star. Star had a literal heart of gold. On weekends, everyone’s darlings Jody and Journey and Jan sometimes played hide-and-go-seek with Star using a metal detector.

The part of Journey in which J. D. came to reside was the left eye. Journey complained of pain, and everyone tried to clear it. When everyone reached into his or her eye, however, Journey cowered. Everyone pushed Journey to the floor and stared. That is how everyone found J. D.

J. D. was slightly larger than Journey’s pupil. The invader was wearing a plaid jacket and galoshes and was carrying an umbrella. No matter, J. D. was soaked as the way his or her clothes stuck to his or her body attested. Journey’s eyeball was wet.

When everyone stared into Journey’s eye, J. D. stared back. If everyone waved, J. D. did too. If everyone raised a finger, so did J. D.

Everyone grabbed a piece of toast and ate it. So did J. D. Everyone took his or her shoe off and tapped it against his or her head. So did J. D.

J. D. was annoying.

Everyone thought carefully regarding the best means by which to remove the invader. Sharp metal objects like tweezers and forks seemed too dangerous. Fingertips might have worked, but Journey wouldn’t stand for them. Water only seemed to make J. D. wetter. And a toothpick could have introduced a splinter, as everyone knew from the Sermon on the Mount, though everyone was unaware of the sermon’s biblical origin, believing it to be the work of his or her coworker Harvey, who had recited parts of it one Sunday while they were cleaning an office.

The only way for everyone to capture J. D. he or she realized was to join him or her. Everyone instructed Journey to open the left eye as wide as possible. “I’m going in,” everyone said, pushing his or her two hands against Journey’s top and bottom eyelid as everyone tried to squeeze in the right foot.

It was in this manner that Journey ended up with a black eye and bloated face, as Journey later explained to others.

Everyone Raises the Darlings

Everyone needed to make money so that she or he could buy a new car, so everyone had taken a second job as a janitor of random office buildings. Unfortunately, the boss of that second job, Harvey, had disappeared, so there was no second job, unless everyone returned to the random office buildings she or he had been to already with the hope that cleaning was needed and pay was forthcoming. But that pay came from Harvey, so it was unlikely.

Everyone thought about starting her or his own business, using everyone’s children, except everyone didn’t have children anymore because everyone had taken some bad advice and killed them. Everyone was learning: Never trust the Internet.

Everyone looked down at the dog beside her or him at the desk as everyone was typing. One’s darlings are one’s darlings for a reason, everyone thought.

Everyone decided on a rescue mission. Everyone was going to resuscitate the darlings, bring them back to life: Jody, the sanctimonious fart-joke expert; Star, the gold-hearted surgical miracle; Journey, the $5092 tax write-off; and Jan, the copy of everyone’s one-time spouse except in the sense that she or he was a six-year-old girl or boy and hadn’t yet found the meaning of life and disappeared. Everyone loaded her or his pen with the intention of letting the kids spill once again across the page.

“Today, my precious progeny,” everyone wrote, “we are going to Dasneyland.”

There was nothing like a Dasneyland Amusement Park Mall to bring kids back to life. Dasneyland had sick-smelling sweet shops in unnatural and unhealthy levels of proliferation, fart-joke bookstores, metal detectors for kids with hearts of rare earth minerals, chocolate carpets, and rooms where one could select new parents or pretend to be one’s own. It also had rides: on faux cars and faux planes and faux boats, all them through faux cities with faux people, and in those faux cities were faux restaurants that served faux food and faux eye doctors with faux eyeglasses. Everyone loved Dasneyland, and so did her or his kids.

Today, especially.

Today was the day that the John Quincy Adams animatron’s job was transferring to Hawaii, and anyone who paid the twenty-seven-dollar entrance fee could go with him. The way you went with him was to stand in a line, and then walk, and then stand in a line some more, and then walk some more, and then stop and listen to John Quincy Adams speak, and then walk some more.

As it turned out, John Quincy Adams knew a lot about Hawaii. Hawaii had hula dancers and Don Hoe and lots of pineapple. If you smelled closely, you could feel the pineapple in your nostrils, and if you listened closely, you could hear the swish of hula skirts on your legs.

“People were uncertain about electing me president,” John Quincy Adams said, after he explained Hawaii to the visitors, “just as they were uncertain about letting Hawaii become a state.”

Jody’s eyes were the first to come alive as everyone stood with her or his kids staring at the president. “Is it really John Adams?” Jody asked. “When is he going to fart?”

Star came next, pushing a hand against her or his metal heart. “I feel like George Washington and I have so much in common,” Star said.

Then came Journey, chocolate lover, who kneeled and licked the floor.

And finally, Jan, who noted that Hawaii would be a good place in which to look for meaning.

Everyone smiled. The kids had come to life just as she or he had wished.

Now came the hard part--making the kids do as everyone expected them to, or at least wanted them to. Everyone could, of course, force the children to accede to her or his wishes, but everyone could not make the kids wish as she or he wished for them to wish.

“Come on, guys,” everyone said to her or his darlings. “Let’s go clean an office building.”

The darlings stared at one another as they stood beside everyone in front of the president. They felt safe with John Quincy Adams and Dasneyland. They were unsure about an office building. They did not want to leave. It was dangerous outside. They knew. They’d already been killed once.

Everyone Wants a New Start

Everyone was searching for a better beginning to his or her novel. Everyone, as per usual, asked his or her friend the Internet. The Internet knew a lot of stuff and was very wise, but it was also self-effacing. “Don’t believe everything that’s posted,” the Internet often told everyone, not wanting to be found a liar. Everyone wanted to believe everything, because they were friends, but this was difficult because the Internet often said things that were contradictory, as with the beginning of novels.

The Internet said to start at the beginning.

The Internet said you will never know the beginning unless you start, so just start.

The Internet said to start in the middle and cut the first four pages.

Everyone reread his or her first four pages. While everyone was not satisfied with their place at the beginning, they seemed needed. In fact, the longer everyone looked at them, the more everyone thought them the work of a genius.

Everyone could not cut them. They were his or her children: Jody, the sanctimonious twelve-year-old with his or her penchant for fart jokes; Star, the sensitive ten-year-old with a heart of literal gold, quite an expense at the time but luckily covered by insurance, given his or her life on the balance sheet; Journey, the rambunctious little dweeb, eight years of age, with a weakness for all things chocolate; and finally Jan, the six-year-old with the personality of everyone’s spouse, which is to say a missing personality, because everyone’s spouse had run away.

“You have to kill your darlings,” the Internet said, “if you want to write.”

The advice seemed nonsensical. Everyone was looking for a start, and if everyone sacrificed the darlings, what would he or she have left? The darlings were essential.

But the Internet was not to be persuaded. “The darlings will keep you from the end of the story and thus from the true beginning,” the Internet said. “Kill the darlings.”

Everyone cried as he or she moved the cursor across the keyboard. First Jody disappeared, then Star, then Journey, then Jan.

Everyone was alone. Except for the dog. The dog was in the third paragraph, breathing on everyone at the keyboard.

Save the dog, the Internet advised. “People love a good dog story.”

“Are you writing this or am I?” everyone asked.

The Internet didn’t answer. The Internet was miffed. Everyone had asked for the Internet’s advice, and the Internet had given it, and if everyone was going to get angry, then there was no reason for the Internet to waste its time.

Everyone was miffed too. Everyone wanted back his or her darlings. Everyone was crying inside and out. But the way of return had been expunged. This was the beginning.

Everyone Goes to the Mall

Some days, everyone went to the Dasney Amusement Park Mall. The Dasney Mall was a knockoff of Disneyland; only it was a mall, and it had all things Dasney instead of Disney: for example, Sinderella’s Bridal Clothes and Dunbo’s Hearing Aids, Banbi’s Taxidermy and Stuffed Animals and Snotty’s Cold and Flu Elixir Shop. Plus, it had dysfunctional rides and long lines. Everything was bright and pastel and had a sheen of lacquer, as if the world were a giant LP with cartoon liner notes.

On this day, everyone took her or his daughter or son with her or him, one of the four. Entry had cost twenty-seven dollars for the child, and everyone was feeling the bite in her or his pocketbook walking around. Everyone and her or his progeny would have to leave to eat lunch elsewhere, and everyone felt bad and cheap about it, but such became requisite when one’s spouse ran away: one was left as poor as a near-sighted librarian without glasses, which was sort of what everyone was. Everyone actually worked for Dasney. Everyone got half off entry to the mall (that is, free for her- or himself), but everyone could still not afford to take all the children at once.

The floor of the candy store in the Dasney Amusement Park Mall sounded like Pop Rawks. The store was a walk-through ride, looping machine arms twisting taffy around for visitors or giant mallets rocking in rhythm, pounding sweet milk from cane. The heart of the store was a computer made of suckers, its parts rotating to 0 or 1 on Popsicle sticks. Everyone stared in wonder. Everyone always stared in wonder, even though she or he had worked for Dasney an amount of time that, according to statistical averages, would have precluded such interest. The reason might have been that everyone’s second child, Star, had a heart of gold. Everyone could identify with metal and hearts and machines.

The child everyone had brought to the mall stood in wonder as well, or so everyone was thinking when everyone noticed that the child’s hand was not in her or his own. Everyone felt a quiver, uncertain whether it was panic or a candy high (the store smelled of bleach and sugar). Unfortunately, there were so many greedy children in Mikey Moose hats that everyone found it near impossible to distinguish her or his child amid the din. The child did not appear to be amid the computer Popsicles or in the pounding room, nor did she or he appear to be in the taffy room or in the peanut peeling quarters.

Where everyone eventually found the child, just as she or he was about to report the child missing, was next to the cash register, inside a giant glass candy bowl. The bowl was full of fifty-pound chocolate bars. The child was sitting atop the heap. Chocolate smeared her or his cheeks, and she or he was still eating.

Everyone warned the child to get out. The child stared at everyone and took another bite.

The chocolate bars were $5092 each, all that everyone had in savings. There was no way that everyone could pay for a bar. Everyone needed the savings to buy a new car. The new car would have room for the four kids and the dog, as well as the missing spouse, though there was no guarantee she or he would ever return to sit in it. The current car was a green that had peeled to gray and smelled of hairballs. It was hard to drive, and everyone often had to pull over after two or three miles to air it out.

Everyone wished that she or he still had the $27 entrance fee.

Everyone hoped that she or he could pay for just part of the chocolate bar, that the store would be willing to cut off the portion eaten and charge only for that. Everyone needed that $5092.

Unfortunately, everyone’s child loved chocolate.

A lot.