Mother Mall's Last Night

Reena Tompkins hated change, which is why she still parted her mousy brown hair down the side. She stood staring at the Public Notice zip-tied to the mall's north entrance: bright yellow paper, bold letters promising A NEW ERA OF COMMUNITY GROWTH with demolition starting Tuesday.

At 9 PM, the soft jazzy music over the loudspeakers shut down. Then the nighttime security guard left by 9:17 PM, as usual, noted by the whistling that faded out through the sliding glass doors. It was an hour past closing on her last shift, and Reena was still wiping down the pretzel oven with the focus and speed of one defusing a bomb. Her tongue clicked on the roof of her mouth in the silence. Nobody made her stay this long. Her manager had left at noon, apologizing about the goodbye cake her team forgot—their last shifts had all been earlier in the week.

So Reena remained, scrapping, wondering if she should even bother with the self-cleaning function. Those things took like two hours, didn't they? So she'd wait. It was as good an alibi as any to explore a space she'd never been this alone in.

Reena locked the gate on the pretzel stand for the last time and walked the mall the long way.

The arcade came first, though it’d been empty for weeks.

Reena had grown up in town but this mall hadn't become home until she was fifteen. That year her parents split into two separate, distracted people instead of one distracted unit. Each seemed relieved to have half as much of her to manage. So she split herself too, spending whatever cash and time she had at the arcade, a shadowy room next to the carousel. She liked the carpeted claustrophobia and the stick of spilled slushie coating her shoes. With enough quarters she could hit things. She'd even graduated from button smashing to actual technique with fighter Chun-Li.

The manager walked up to her mid-combo one evening and asked whether she'd like to earn a little money. She told him she wasn't that desperate yet. He stammered no, at the ticket counter, handing out prize tokens to kids.

Now the arcade was a damned dark rectangle behind a roll-down gate. So she kept walking.

She’d traded its birthday-party wallpaper for Claire's at sixteen, after an ear piercing cemented her as a real woman. Two heart-shaped titanium studs. She spent half of every paycheck on surprise bags and necklaces with her name in cursive. Then eventually picked up extra hours at the pretzel place outside.

That was where she met Danny, with one small silver hoop in his left ear. Reena loved him instantly, the way you love anything that finally picks you. They lasted four months. He broke up with her on that giant escalator up to the movie theater, in the middle of what she'd believed was a big date. He hesitated only to pat her shoulder when he heard her sob halfway through A Haunting in Connecticut, leaving small grease circles on the sleeve of her best blouse. Or maybe it was from those cheesy pretzel bites he was so obsessed with. She didn't notice until she was under the fluorescent bathroom lights, wiping at her ruined mascara in the mirror, which she'd bought at Claire's.

Claire's was empty now too, the piercing chair gone, the earring wall stripped to a pegboard. So she kept walking.

The day after that breakup she requested a transfer to JCPenney. Getting hired there felt like the mall was really taking care of her. Full-time, a badge that said ASSOCIATE instead of TEAM MEMBER, a break room with a couch. That acceptance arrived the same week as her college rejection. Reena decided it was proof she belonged exactly here. She was the fated daughter of Mother Mall.

Back then, her biggest obstacle was socializing with the Spencer kids on their smoke breaks, watching them from the glass enclosure between entrance and exit. Two years later she was losing both that opportunity and belonging. To progress.

JCP's doors were chained now, the window mannequins naked, arms twisted above their heads. It went the way of Sears and the fountain-soda pizza place. And Reena had to transfer back to the pretzel kiosk. The mall walkers in their orthopedics kept them with a steady flow of customers, at least until Mother’s vitals dropped to unmanageable levels.

So she kept walking. Past the empty fountain. Past the gutted Sunglass Hut, spears of plastic racks still standing at the ready, motion-sensor lights flickering three seconds too late. Somewhere in the distance, one of the overhead speakers cackled with a loud static POP.

As Mother was one long, open floor plan, she’d almost rounded the entire atrium. Exploring all except for the cinema, the only place with an escalator. Her crown jewel.

Reena climbed up on foot; the only escalator was dead at this hour. Ten meters up, she stared back over the waist-high glass guardrail into a rotting husk. She stared so long the checkered tile floor gleamed like a hypnotic trap, and she felt her body tilt forward.

“Learn to lean in,” she remembered from her friends' texts—friends who now took five days to reply to a message. They read one book and suddenly they're experts on leadership. Well, she could learn.

A clattering sound snapped her focus to the concession stand, where she locked eyes with a man in his forties. An inch of snaggled hair circled his face with tiny half-popped kernels throughout. He smiled at her. His teeth were perfectly straight but stained orange, like his dentist pulled a prank on him.

“You're not maintenance,” he said.

“I work at the pretzel stand.” As if that explained anything.

He said his name was Gary. He'd had a job and a wife he loved, until she found texts from a girlfriend he liked less but who was better in bed. He lost the job too, and in his telling, that's what turned the wife into a gold digger who took everything bankruptcy hadn't.

“So I came here to see a movie and escape from my recent sorrows,” he continued. “Some superhero thing. Don't remember which, but it had that hot alien in it. Anyways. I just—didn't leave. Nowhere else felt like anything, you know? And at least this place still had its lights on.”

Reena understood this better than she wanted to admit.

“The world just doesn't work for some people,” he added, not quite looking at her as he spoke. “I did everything right. Everything they tell you to do! And it still fell apart in my hands.”

She thought about her mother, who'd traded her in for a new model: a tiny half-sister who now had two working parents and a backyard. She thought about her father, who called on her birthday from whichever state he was currently residing in with whatever girlfriend of the month. She started to tell Gary these things, as a peace offering, sharing more than she'd meant to, competing without meaning to compete. As if grief had a leaderboard and she needed to place herself on top.

“Chin up. You're still just a kid,” he said, “You don't know real struggle yet, real hardship.”

“Well, I guess I haven't had enough time to screw everyone over in my life yet,” she retorted. He glared at her now, lip curling to expose the fuzz of plague breeding underneath.

She laughed. “You ever think it’s all your own damn fault? The way you're able to eat leftover popcorn off the floor but too above applying for a job at the concession stand, I bet.”

He didn't like that. But she kept going. Something ugly in her felt liberated.

“You know Danny? From the pretzel stand?” Had she already brought him up? She thought she had. “Before he broke my heart I used to make him those little cheesy pretzel bites on our lunch breaks. As soon as I sent in that JCP transfer, I made him some as a piece offering. They were so hot he burned the roof of his mouth and had to go to the ER.” She smiled as her tongue grazed the roof of hers. “Now THAT felt like the only fair thing that happened to me that whole year.”

“That's—psychotic, actually. You're fucked up in the head.”

“Takes one to know one. You live in a movie theater.” And for one absurd second she pictured them watching something stupid together in an empty theater. But Gary had other plans.

“I decided I'm going to save this mall,” he said, standing up suddenly. They both had sat on the concession floor during Reena’s lifetime tirade.

Gary explained how he intended to save the mall by chaining himself to the doors, calling the news, making a scene loud enough that someone with money would have to notice. “Preservation is progress,” he exclaimed, “destroy a place and you never get it back!”

It was beautiful, actually. But she pushed up off the floor as well to tell him he sounded stupid. The mall didn't need a hostage situation, it needed someone who understood it. Someone who'd grown with it, not crawled into its last warm corner to hide and suck on his wounds.

He called her a naive baby. She swore at him some more. Then he swung, both fists forward like a tantruming child—not to grab her, she understood too late, but to hurt her. One punch got her throat, the other grazed her jaw. Wheezing, she scrambled over the counter, and ran.

The long escalator to the main atrium sat in silence. She hit the top, sprinting downward without any stops, combat boots slapping steel. Behind her, Gary tripped on the velvet rope stanchion he'd been using as a drying rack; she heard the smack of his body hit the escalator's top platform hard enough to knock the air out of him.

She made it to the bottom of the stairs first and spun towards the control box bolted to the wall: a rusted panel with a keyed switch, UP / OFF / DOWN stenciled above in paint now the color of weak coffee. The key was in it. This whole floor wasn't worth the trouble of locking up properly anymore.

Gary was still down, sprawled over the top step, reaching for the rubber rail to pull himself up.

Reena turned the key to UP.

The escalator woke with a groan, gears catching and steps flattening out. The comb plate caught the cuff of Gary’s jeans first. Then it caught skin—pinched at the ankle where step met plate, and held. He wrenched his leg and the mechanism didn't give an inch. It strained against him instead, motor grinding somewhere below the floor, the whole staircase shuddering like something choking on a bone too big to swallow. He wasn't going anywhere. Blood welled up at the seam of his sock and pooled into the grooves of the trapped step, red as the cinema's carpet. It matched the aesthetic.

He screamed in a register she didn't know a man could reach. The machine didn't care. A shoe clunked on the steps at an awkward half-fall, wanting to go down but being thrust consistently back up.

Reena stood at the bottom and watched. Her tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth.

A loud beeping cut through the screaming. Some small, cheerful, electronic three long notes. It was an alarm from the pretzel kiosk. Squinting in that direction, she noticed CLEAN END flashed across the oven’s screen in green digits. And a cloud of smoke collecting into the expanse of space above. That space was already dark, despite the skylights on the ceiling where the cinema wasn't, so it took her a full second to understand the fire was real. It was the burning smell that convinced her. Probably from all the leftover ingredients she'd thrown into the oven before its self-cleaning cycle. Above the oven, the mitts she’d left draped over the vent had gone up too.

A thin orange flame began climbing the inside of her kiosk, fueled by cinnamon sugar and napkin stacks, throwing shadows against the metallic walls of the refrigerator.

Behind her, Gary screamed in an even higher pitch, if that was possible. He must have noticed the looming black above too. Or the oven rumbling, ready to burst out more red-orange reflux.

Reena looked at the kiosk. She looked at him. She thought about the poster, the one promising a new era starting on Tuesday. Then she turned towards the sliding glass doors.

Nobody stopped her. No one waited outside with a cigarette in hand. Just an endless concrete parking lot with one car left sitting in the dark. Still nothing new.