Under New Management
Walking in our old neighborhood, I discover our house has been replaced by a smoothie joint. I go in and ask the woman behind the register if she knows what happened. She is wearing a nametag that says SMOOTHIE ARTIST, and I am prepared to accept this at face value – who am I to place one form of art above another? – until I see that one of the O’s is adorned with an umlaut! (And I saw the best punctuation marks of my generation stripped of their grammatical function, forced under duress to endorse the authentic Europeanness of smoothie companies headquartered in Piscataway.) She seems to sense my discomfort, and asks if I have any questions about their new menu items (as if I could be bought off so easily!) so I say, yeah, I have a question: why do things have to keep changing? I already feel like I need to have children just so someone can show me how to work the remote, and though they are yet unborn, I can feel their seething resentment. They will send me to a nursing home (where I hope at least they will have Nintendo, which is to say that I hope the things I have devoted my life to will still matter to someone) then, on account of budget cuts, I will be forced to wander the streets, only to find my favorite pizza place has been replaced by a robo-brothel falsely promising passable bootleg copies of irretrievable past lovers. No, that isn’t nearly apocalyptic enough. The city streets will be flooded like they were in my childhood nightmares (and certain big budget disaster movies) though this will only have increased the rent values of high rises, and a boy will pass me in a canoe, having learned to paddle during that year the transit strike shut down the Staten Island ferry but he still had to get to school in Manhattan. His short-armed strokes will form urgent spirals in the murky water, and I will try (and fail) to mine them for prophecy. The Smöothie Artist apologizes for any inconvenience I have been caused (which, in its comprehensiveness, is heartbreakingly generous). I forgive her for the sins of her company and she offers (intimately, behind a cupped hand that could be a curtain she is pulling shut behind us) to make me a smoothie.
It is no longer on the menu but was at one time their most popular item.
It is as bright as I imagined. But also brutally fucking cold.