McAmbre

Prologue - Third Wish

The Indulgence of Revenge Tends to Make Men More Savage and Cruel - Henry Home

The door to Toni's Thrift, a popular site for travelers going through McAmbre, was thrown open on the rainy afternoon of March 27th, 2012. Mr. Devin McGowen strode through, transfixed on finding a buggy. He gave no thought to wiping his soaked tennis shoes on the mat beneath him before acquiring a cart. Squeaks began echoing hollowly through the tall, empty ceiling of the old thrift store. He paced around the aisles, muttering to himself. Anne Hall, a recent graduate of McAmbre High and a mother of two, watched as he rushed through the aisles like a shark's dorsal fin in the shallows.

"Hey, director, can I help you find anything?" she called. His buggy protruded from an aisle just within her sight, then stopped. Perhaps he was thinking. She heard a sigh, and then he emerged. His face was weary - rotten dark circles were festering under his eyes.

"I'm just looking for stuff," came his cryptic response. Anne raised an eyebrow as she mulled over the statement. After a few seconds of smacking her Five gum, she led him to complete the question like an elementary teacher.

"What type of stuff, Mr. McGowen?" she asked. He thought of the empty room awaiting him at home. Blackout curtains, obsessively swept and mopped black floorboards, and the deep, disgustingly rich smell of air saturated with incense. It pissed him off beyond belief before sinking him into a bottomless pit of sorrow. That fucking doctor, he thought.

"Decorations," he managed. Anne pointed a finger possessing a missile of an acrylic orange nail towards the far right corner of the store, and he was off. The cluttered racks of lost and neglected treasures called to him from every angle. Some gadgets and tools of usefulness protruded on occasion - all complete with their own deformities. Just like him, but not like Angel. Angel's mind was mysterious but kind, or so he had thought.

His eyes weren't watering, yet he could not focus. He stared up, focusing his eyes on a fluorescent light above before looking down. The floor was littered with broken plastic, dust, the occasional strand of hair, and stains lazily left for who knows how long. He began plucking items from the shelves, slowly cascading useless memorabilia into the cavern of the buggy. He didn't care what it cost. He couldn't give two shits, he thought. Money was useless to a man in his shoes.

A small globe landed in the cart, and then a candle. A sign saying peace made out of painted English peas was next. A sparkle caught his eye from the middle of the oncoming aisle, something metallic. He picked up the lamp and almost dropped it. Heavy, he thought. He held the bronze lamp closer to inspect it. Smooth carvings of the ocean adorned one side and a forest on the other. Subconsciously, he sniffed the lamp as he observed it, for it was only a few inches from his face. The scent screamed cinnamon. He flipped the bronze candle over to inspect its origins. There was no English writing present; instead, there was a mad arrangement of symbols he did not understand.

On the polished underside, he caught a glimpse of himself. A once full face was now thinner, and the dark circles under his eyes gave off the impressions of an addict. His scraggly, peppered beard was not uniform, and the space between his eyebrows had grown hairs, not noticeable enough to be a unibrow, but troubling nonetheless.

His dentures - which no one could ever tell were dentures - shone brightly in the polished surface of the lamp, but even they brought him a pang of sadness. His teeth were all gone. Chewing tobacco and a brutal stretch in his twenties, when he couldn't will himself to be clean at the bare minimum as a cocktail of depression and obsession with horror films overtook him. The words of his late uncle, a fellow director, hit home.

"Shit just doesn't last, Dev," he had said while viewing the damage a tornado had wrought on the family estate, which was occupied by Devin's mother. He hollowly repeated the statement and placed the item carefully in the buggy.