She—some folks called her Jill—used to buy love at the shopping mall, but then all the malls died. She probably died, too, but she still went love-shopping. Vallie Lynn Watson
The card store should have held love inside its thousands of abandoned paper folds. And Jill even spread and searched every open fold, and Jill even refolded some of the loveless folds.
In the TV store, Jill paused to watch herself on screen, a star in some long-running TV series, then she carefully smashed all the screens, peered inside them to see if they held love. They did not.
At the Mona Lisa store, Jill looked for love. She took a piece of TV glass from her pocket and scratched the gilded frames, flaking gold onto the thin gray carpeting. The frames died, loveless.
That was just the start.
Jill eventually went to the beanbag store for a quick nap. Reclined, nude. But Jill was restless, so she sliced open the fabrics with her TV glass. She laced her fingers, raked her fingers, plunged her fingers through the weightless beans, for hours and hours and hours, but her fingers found no love.
After a dozen more loveless stores, Jill approached the carousel. She petted the horses. Cooed to the lions. Laughed with the wooden giraffes, then hugged them tight.
Finally, Jill stepped down from the carousel, took the piece of TV glass to the tips of her fingers, and drew 73 tiny red hearts in a neat circle around the round of her new friends.
She makes me laugh. Jill. Jill makes me laugh.
