[15: She always looked forward to the candies, but didn’t really like the rest]

The store in the center of town had the same dingy look as everything else. Half care-worn, half neglected. The parking lot was as cracked as the road, and weeds poked through, moving the uneven pavement haphazardly. Some of them stood waist high, at least around the edge of the lot. 

She parked close to the store. There were only a handful of cars, since most of the town drove the fifteen minutes to the Walmart at the edge of Chester. The clerk glanced up at her from the row of registers, looking bored under the single lamp illuminated in the row, the number “4”. She waved, and then darted down the aisles, past the hand-written signs in neon pink and orange, and down the aisle where the dish soap lived.

She swore that half the brands on the shelves weren’t made anymore. None of the shiny, minimalist packages that she was used to at home, just glaring blue and red labels.  She picked up a bottle, looking like the same yellow liquid that was in every bottle regardless of brand, shrugged and put it in the red basket.

Dish gloves, sponges, a package of scouring pads. She realized that she’d never purchased so many cleaning products at once.

She returned to the front of the store, and unloaded the basket onto the faded brown turntable that fed into the register. She wondered if there was a word for feeling a long-forgotten sensation or memory. They’d had checkout lanes like that when she’d been a kid, she had climbed up onto one to get to the bright packages of candies, and had been surprised when it moved. 

Now it just looked run down, shabby, not the complicated and exciting thing it had been.

“That’ll be $11.29.”

The cashier still looked bored.

She paid, waiting what seemed like an eternity for her debit card to clear. Every time it took that long, she worried that it wouldn’t work. But it did, the silence almost deafening until the cheery “Beep” and the printer started with a rattle to finish the receipt.

“Have a nice day.”

“You too.”