kiteuna

Mom and dad had to get some stuff at the renovation shop out of town. You wander off toward some mowers next to a thorough display of mulch, pavers and stones. From your vantage you can see assembled playhouses tents and two playground sets with "DO NOT CLIMB" signs on them and roped off stairs. You hop onto a tank control zero turn mower and grab the levers. You imagine it morphing into a power armor suit or mech of some sort, with the blade hood becoming a shield and the blades becoming a helipack and double-bladed sword. The canopied seat shifts into an armored cab and the tank levers form into a full Power Rangers style Zord control panel. The how and why doesn’t matter, you are nine. You imagine yourself fighting The Bad Guys™ with your awesome Battle Mower. After you beat all The Bad Guys™, your parents call you to a doored off area with windows that appears to be a playplace for kids to wait for their parents to shop. You plop down on a beanbag chair placed on generic white

2:35AM, dead of night at a paved truck stop gas station with plastic signs glowing with the aid of the fluorescent tubes they obscure. The concrete oasis glows bright enough that all but Venus and Polaris are washed from vision. It is mostly silent save for the occasional late night driver zooming past on the nearby highway or hungry raccoon digging in the dumpster. You head into the establishment, fully stocked and pristine with a bored cashier idling on her phone. She looks at you like you’re the first human she’s seen in a week. You browse the atypical flavors of Gardetto’s Snack Mix and Doritos corn chips, past the spectrum of Ghost, Rockstar and Monster, to the portable cups of Froot Loops and Cheerios. You lean on the counter for the public microwave and stare at the canned Beefaroni and boxes of Zatarain’s Ready Rice. Eventually you settle on a Macho-Sized Slim Jim and a diet RC Cola (you gotta stay healthy, after all.) You bring your snack up to the counter and grab a word

Your friends rented out an old industrial ice house turned venue for an evening. They are in a small band, and have a merged tour date with another set of bands you don’t know. You sit on various mismatched couches and end tables in a large brick and concrete room, lit with soft incandescent bulbs whose old interior walls are adorned with dozens of vintage mirrors of all shapes and sizes. To the south end of the wide L-shaped storehouse corridor is a raised black platform flanked by large concert-grade speakers. A few plastic folding merch tables lie on the longer north end of the room with CDs, shirts and buttons. You head to your friend’s band’s table and wait for someone to ring you up, when one of the guys on the old loveseat facing away from the tables says “Hey,” you wave as you look at a CD. He says “You can just take it.” You chuckle and shrug it off a bit, standing there awkwardly. He continues. “I mean it. I’m in the band.” A bit surprised, you ask if he’s sure. He nods.

It’s 2:35PM, on an overcast Saturday. No Doubt is on the FM station with a Z in the name, singing Hella Good and you are playing a 4-way Sunken Defense map on Starcraft: Brood War. Dad is outside mowing while mom is doing paperwork on her ostensible day off. It smells like Air Wick Fresh Waters spray and freshly mowed fescue and clover. It’s always the zerglings that mess up the run for everyone. You sign out and take a break to go get a glass of cold milk and watch some AAAHH!!! Real Monsters and Global GUTS. You wish your friends could come over. You haven’t been able to get better scores on Pokémon Snap in days. Maybe one of them could help out. Not today, though–everyone’s busy. Disappointing. You decide to go back to the desk which supplants a bottom bank and decide to give the map another shot, but everyone is playing turret defense now so you switch to that, instead. It gets dark out, and you decide to just chat with friends for a while, now watching 3 Ninjas on VHS as the wind

Sunlight becomes moonlight becomes sunlight again. The Land Before Time becomes two, five, seven, ten, twelve, fourteen. Pokémon becomes Sailor Moon becomes Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends becomes My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Preschool becomes elementary, middle, high school, college, work. Talking becomes phone, becomes AIM becomes MSN becomes Skype becomes Discord. 8-bit becomes 16, 32l 64, becomes more. Friend circles shrink, people leave, people pass, smiles fade. The view out the window changes. The weight on the shoulders grows. Hanson becomes Spice Girls becomes Linkin Park becomes The JV Allstars becomes Go Radio and Every Avenue becomes Dangerkids and Starset and too many to count. Donkey Kong Country becomes Kirby Superstar becomes Banjo-Kazooie becomes Super Smash Bros.: Melee becomes Minecraft becomes Borderlands 2 becomes To the Moon and Undertale becomes Rakuen and Deltarune. Your birthday becomes Christmas becomes Independence Day becomes Halloween. Stars

It feels like some sort of casino resort level from a video game–one that plays cavalier with physics. You find yourself able to run on the walls, ceilings and floating platforms with ease. There are long tracks with checkerboards of numbers you can race along, with different values on their two tones of pink, occasionally interrupted by blue tiles, as well as green aerial surfaces you can easily hop to. The values, written in bold white numbers vary from high to low to negative values, with the harder to reach squares being better on average. It seems like a high speed, multisurface game of hopscotch that scales multiple rooms, tunnels and floors. The surfaces you hit combine with your speed on a scoreboard, not unlike you’d see at a football stadium, and when a run is successfully completed, the scores calculate a final total, which earns prizes, saved to a card to exchange at the prize counter. You try it a couple times, falling off the course and disqualifying the run before

Somewhere halfway through your adventure (you speculate) you happen upon a cave with a wooden doorway built into the entrance. There are signs of a villainous group of traffickers, so you open the door cautiously, but ready to battle if it comes to it. You fancy yourself agile and stealthy, with just enough swordsmanship and magic to be dangerous in combat. The cave is mostly akin to any other at its start: dank and gray, but the deeper you get, the more you realize why a group of people willing to do anything for money and power might make this a base. Inner tunnels are sparkling with glowing violet and creamy yellow gemstones–some tiny, some you likely couldn’t fully wrap your arms around. You hear voices. You use a bright pink crystal as a barrier and overhear the jingling of change in the distance, as well as the deeper ringing of chains. Once you are confident nobody is headed your way, you scurry underneath the raised wooden platforms they erected (likely to prevent flood

The concrete establishment’s high ceilings and oppressive atmosphere do little to calm your nerves as you are hard at work. This multiethnic grocery store, built from a brutalist three-story structure decades old, bears thick concrete walls and a rigid geometric profile. The inside is furnished with brightly lit synthetic tubes which hum and emit a very harsh white light, illuminating fifty year old coolers and sealed gray floors. At this time of mid-afternoon, the floors are busy with the sound of aged metal carts with wobbly and creaky wheels, as well as the chatter of shoppers. The whommmm of the air conditioner recycles the air and drowns out the processed, corporate easy listening instrumentals. You head to the back room to take a break between palettes of 50 lb. bags of rice. The sound of a fork truck is working away with its occasional strings of shrill “beep, beep, beep”s rings in the near distance. Lunch seems hours upon hours away, time to go home may as well be days from

Even if the layout only vaguely resembles it, you know you are in your suburban downtown you’ve visited hundreds of times. It seems more culturally diverse than half of you recalls, the other half insists it’s always been just like this. Cables zigzag across building façades’ second and third floors with colored banners promoting various shops, concerts and events. The majority of the area is no taller than five floors high. You wander down the central street of downtown. The trolley scoots lazily up the center of the pedestrian road. It smells of the fried food and sugary confections wafting from various vendor tents. Your stomach rumbles, but you are meeting your family for dinner, best not spoil your appetite. You find an old favorite shop: a long-running, still busy comic, game and music store. They seem to have recently merged with a local bookstore, creating a one-stop media shop. Redesign is still underway, but you make your way to the collectible cards and die counter near

The thunder is hellacious tonight. It must be after 2 in the morning, mom has called you to a startled state of alert. She pulls you, your sister and the dogs to your musty, unfinished basement amid old models and older furniture. You’re small enough you are sitting in her lap. She makes a small bed out of the things down here. The floor is a bit damp, and the few dim bulbs don’t remove the creepiness from the area. She urges you to get back to sleep, now that you’re safe. She sits guard over your sister and you with an AM radio powered by four D cell batteries giving updates on the weather. She goes upstairs to answer the only phone hooked to the wall by a wire. The white one in the kitchen. The power goes out, and she turns on a lantern. She says dad is okay, holed up at work. The phone rings again. She heads upstairs and after a few agonizing minutes, comes back. It was grandma. She sits back down and runs her fingers through your hair, and… ring, ring. She sighs and stomps