| I stroll along plastic brick streets lined with cotton candy bushes, tasting the filtered air. Magic Plastic Land. Birds dip down and snatch gumdrops out of outstretched hands, their cashew beaks holding the prize until they return to their spun sugar nests with candied plum chicks. I watch the mother birds and keep walking, with a singular mission: to become deliriously, mind-numbingly happy. |
But that’s everyone’s goal in Magic Plastic Land. Stuff yourself to the gills with sugar dreams and smiles. Listen to the saccharine music and forget about the melting icebergs in Nunavut and the pollution-choked skies in China. Those places are far away and their grim grayness doesn’t cut through the rainbow delights of Magic Plastic Land.
All around, dancing feet. All around, giggles and grins.
Buy this, buy that. Feed the Cheshire grins on the fat cats’ faces as they look over their sticky kingdom.
It’s just how they want it—every fudge brick in place, every mind on the colors and floaty-feet, spinny-headed bliss. Visitors unaware they are walking around a live trap. (Can you spot the mice?)
A turtle rushes across my path, as only turtles in Magic Plastic Land can do. I cry out and trip over his multi-colored mosaic shell. My face hits the gold block road and I feel a scrape across my cheek. A flash of pain; a searing moment of reality. I look up.
The fat cat tower leans over the road. The Cheshire smiles beam.
A prickle under my skin. My breath comes hot and sharp. Every inhale brings syrup into my lungs and they begin to stick together. The tower.
I’m suddenly angry at the tower and the cats and the trapped mice world they created. I pick myself up off the gleaming ground and touch my stinging cheek. A medic bustles toward me, silver-haired and manicured. “Sir,” he says, “allow me to escort you to the medical tent. We’ll give you hot chocolate and a free Fast Pass and–”
I hold up a hand and he trails off. “Go,” I say. My flat voice, my blazing eyes make the silver-haired man back away, shuffle off in the other direction. I watch him go, then turn my attention back to the tower. I take a step toward it, then another. Soon, I’m striding, approaching the kaleidoscope-swirled door with swinging arms and a set jaw. I have no plan, but I feel the need to do something, hit the switch that turns off the manufactured ecstasy. My hand reaches toward the door handle.
Kate Bitters is a freelance writer, marketer, and author of Elmer Left and Ten Thousand Lines. She is writing a story a week in 2015-2016 on the Bitter Blog. Subscribe to follow her journey.
Author: KateBitters
Kate Bitters is a Minneapolis-based author and freelance writer. She is the author of Elmer Left, Ten Thousand Lines, and He Found Me. One of her proudest/nerdiest moments was when Neil Gaiman read one of her short stories on stage at the Fitzgerald Theater.
This is the feeling I have when walking through the Mall of America.