Here  —  where once had been a Merry Go Round, a United Colors of Benetton, a Chess King, and where now the protagonist stands outside the store  —  the mall is dead. Cattails grow where the fountain once burbled in the central court. Squirrels nest between the ceiling tiles and the ducts and wiring. Etcetera. 

It’s best not to wonder why the protagonist still comes to this mall, or how he gains entry past the chain link fence surrounding the once-filled parking lot, the top rim of said fencing looped with barbed wire. Nor how the protagonist gets across the vast empty stretch of the parking lot, where the lines demarcating parking spaces are fading, and the asphalt’s cracked, and tufts of sawtooth grass spring up  —  a prairie returning  —  without the lone security truck that roams the ruin catching sight of him. Don’t worry how the protagonist gets through the chained and padlocked swinging doors that open into the mall’s crumbling interior. What matters is that here we find the protagonist. Let’s lose the article, and just cut to the heart of it: he is Protagonist.

Protagonist thinks, How I loved this mall. There, in the space where once Hot Topic had housed its piles of Guns n’ Roses T-shirts, now only the asbestos tiles from the ceiling have plummeted and shattered and make of the tile floor a dusty moonscape. Protagonist remembers wanting to buy  —  or steal, if he could  —  the shiny knives once locked into display cases in the center of the floorspace. 

And it is just as Protagonist is thinking of this, and of his old flame  —  how they wandered the corridors after a movie let out, wanting to hold hands, but worried about the sidelong looks and snide smiles and unwanted comments from the other teenagers and the children and even the adults, and how they both walked around in Hot Topic, she in her leather motorcycle jacket and he in his jean jacket with the sleeves cut off and both jackets patched up with patches of their favorite bands’ names and logos  —  that behind him to his side, just past the Hot Topic’s dust-crusted and emptied display windows, he catches a glimpse of movement. Some flash of hair and body, something humanoid, then it’s gone. 

We might call this figure, or the apparition of this figure, the antagonist, although that feels a bit oppositional to Protagonist, who does not feel this way  —  in opposition to whatever it is he thinks he saw. He’s simply curious. What was that? He looks up and down the empty corridor. Little bits of broken glass and dust drifted into drifts from wind driven through the broken skylights  —  source of aforementioned glass. And in the drifts sprout tufts of brome, a few oak seedlings  —  all lit by shafts of sunlight that fall obliquely from the remains of a skylight in the abandoned mall’s ceiling. There’s no one else around. But Protagonist knows that. There’s never anyone else around. And he knows what he saw, or at least that he saw something, or someone. So he goes looking. We might as well call what he searches for a desire. 

The remains of the sign denoting the department store, unlit, hung like some code: S  RS. 

Protagonist searches what remains of the mall for Antagonist (we have succumbed to this denotation out of convenience). In what had once been the food court, Protagonist detects some new sensory phenomenon: a smell. It is an odor, though faint. It is a smell that Protagonist recalls, and he tries to place it. It’s not a smell he associated with the food court, not when the food court was living. Back then the smells had been of fresh baked cookies, hamburgers, french fries, corndogs from the Hot Dog on a Stick, and the whiff of citrus from the Orange Julius. This was a smell like that of dead or dying plant matter, the smell of decay, though it was faint, like something had died a long time ago and the process of decay was complete, or near to that, and only a bit of the odor remained. 

And here in the food court, where once cheap tables and chairs had been arranged in a checkerboard of seating options, and where once shoppers had dined on the worst of foods  —  good, affordable, and delicious, but wholly non-nutritious and fattening foods  —  but where now nothing but dirt and dust gathers, Protagonist spies a lone potted ficus, still thriving, caught in a spear of light, and pinned under yet another shattered skylight  —  these ubiquitous above mall food courts  —  where, apparently, sufficient rain and/or snowfall has provided water enough for the plant to survive. Though, Protagonist notices, there is something odd about the plant. And as he draws near, there are two odd things about said plant. A dripping drips from the plant. It is a slow dripping, dripping like snot. That is the first odd thing. The second odd thing is that the plant is parked near what could have only once been the Chick-fil-A. Protagonist knows this by the faint outline of the classic Chick-fil-A logo in the faded paint that surrounds where the neon sign was once held on the sheetrock above the fast food storefront. Ah, Protagonist realizes, there are three, three odd things (he says this this way in his head, and half-laughs to himself at the way he sounds like the Count from Sesame Street) about all of this: there’s no way that the planted ficus tree could have been here all this time, in this spot where it would receive this sunlight and (so Protagonist assumes) water. No, the plant had to have been placed here. And, four (there are now four odd things): Protagonist knows that said plant was not always placed here, because Protagonist cannot help himself from haunting this abandoned mall, and he would’ve noticed said plant in the food court in previous visits, had it been here, which it was not. But all this aside, what’s most important to acknowledge here is that these are what we would call clues. They serve as information that expands our understanding of what Protagonist might be up against with Antagonist (those names not yet really being accurate notwithstanding). 

Protagonist wonders: was it a ficus that was planted in the pot in the stepped resting area where he and his beloved had once sat to kiss? There a fountain had burbled and the steps, porcelained in faux porcelain, descended with spaces for tired-out mall-shoppers to stop for a rest. And there Protagonist and his beloved had found a cove wherein they sat thigh to thigh and snuggled and kissed, and this Protagonist remembers as bliss. Here is where anyone who wonders about character development would wonder what happened to Protagonist, for let me tell you, it has been many years since these alluded-to kisses. 

He has not gone loveless in the intervening years. In fact, he has been married, though, thankfully, no children. This latter’s important only for the sake of the unbegotten children, not that Protagonist would not have wanted children, just that the choice of mate for the aforementioned marriage was not at the top, so they say, of his list. Protagonist, like many youngsters, lived his adult life largely in solitude, occasionally meeting up with random friends from his high school years on those days off from his grueling work. And, let me tell you, Protagonist did indeed endure grueling days of work. In fact he commuted more than two hours one-way so that he might enjoy a job supervising the meat department in a grocery store chain in a larger city far from this suburban mecca, where this abandoned mall lies. Four hours a day (plus the eight hour shift) Protagonist drove the lonely miles, populated of course by other lonely commuters, to his grocery store where he worked, diligently, uncomplainingly. He could’ve gone to college  —  not college college, for his high school grades weren’t sufficient, but community college, sure  —  but that meant years yet more of school and that was something Protagonist was surely sickly of by the time it came to his taking care of himself, something which Protagonist’s parents foisted on the young man (not that anyone can blame them) upon his twenty-first year. 

But there has always been something missing, something Protagonist feels he had when he walked with his beloved along the corridors of this mall when he was fourteen years old. And these are the thoughts Protagonist thinks as he stands in front of what had once been the Chick-fil-A, staring at what he believes to be a ficus that he now feels certain had to have been placed here in this spot on purpose, but by whom? Perhaps what he thought he saw he actually saw, for what Protagonist is beginning to think he saw was a person. It might have been only some play of what little light made its way into the mall’s corridors, but it might have been  —  just possibly  —  another person. 

Protagonist decides there’s only one way to find out for sure and that is to walk around and look. But that’s what Protagonist does all the time everytime he returns to this abandoned mall. He simply walks around and looks. What is he looking at? He realizes that he looks at what used to be this, the food court, and he remembers a time when this food court would be bustling with humans, where he and his beloved shared french fries, and one time  —  ah the memory hits him as he’s leaving the food court and passes the spot where’s he’s sure the store space was  —  Taco Bell, and he remembers buying his beloved the tacos she had never tried before, because his beloved had not been from this country, this America. She had been a foreign exchange student. And Protagonist and his beloved had sat here in the now empty space where once tables had been arranged, and they’d unwrapped Taco Bell tacos and eaten them together, and Protagonist’s beloved had remarked that the food was good, very different, but good. Protagonist’s beloved had hailed from an eastern European country where tacos were, shall we say, hard to come by. 

Now it is that Protagonist sits thinking these thoughts. He has wasted his time in this abandoned mall, and in chasing what he thought might have been a person. The sudden realization shoots through him, that he has wasted most of his life. It’s not that he hasn’t done things, achieved, etcetera. He has. So he would like to think. He has his apartment, here in this suburban city. He has his Honda. He pays his bills. But it’s now that he sits on the dusty moonscape floor near the dripping potted ficus, almost, but not quite, in the single spear of light, that he thinks that it doesn’t really matter if what he thought he saw was another person. He thinks, what is a person? He thinks, what is a mall? We could call this the culmination, the realization, the anagnorisis, though protagonist has never even heard that word. He thinks he’s going to leave the mall now. But he’s stuck. He’s stuck here sitting where he often once sat, and he thinks.

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Jamie Iredell lives in Atlanta.