Excerpt: The Mall Rats of America

The mall was quiet at daybreak. The rows of department store clothes hung in muffled silence, their arms weighed down at their sides and their ankles held by gravity barely gracing the floor. Mannequins hunched their cold shoulders forward and pouted to no one with blank stares of boredom, trapped behind polished glass walls. Cosmetic mirrors reflected the crystalline stillness of perfume bottles cased like jewels. The air was thick with the scent of stale packing peanuts and empty Styrofoam coffee cups.
The dull white lines of parking spots sucked in the sun’s first rays greedily, sick of the dim sulfur yellow glow of the halogen lot lights high above them. The light reflected glaringly off windows larger than life, and a lone car pulled crookedly into a parking spot far from the door of a pricey department store. As the young man in the driver’s seat closed his eyes and sighed, collecting himself for the day ahead of him, the building took its first breath of life. The walls were dripping with the echoes of footsteps and nameless faces. His car door creaked as he opened it and slammed shut resolutely. He was dwarfed by the magnitude of the building before him, a speck, a pawn; his gait remained steady, practiced. He didn’t so much as flinch as the heavy doors that held the darkness in welcomed the man, swung open, and swallowed him whole.