Shortly after closing time on a cold December Saturday, the well-known mall northwest of Boston was emptying fast.
The shoppers, even the teenagers, had left, and now it was the employees streaming across the facility's vast and nearly deserted parking lots.
These included the sales clerks of Circuit World, who were beelining to their vehicles, getting in and speeding off. All except one, that is, who couldn’t. In the first place he couldn’t because he didn’t own a vehicle; in the second place because he got waylaid by another, taller individual, who hurried up behind him.
“Hey, Schmickiss . . .”
It was Brian, his general manager.
“I realize you’re off the clock, Schmickiss,” said Brian. “But I had to tell you how impressed I was by the sale you just made. That couple? They were going to walk out. You changed their minds.”
“Thanks, Brian.”
“Not at all. It was great. And reminded me I’ve been meaning to speak with you, now that you’ve been here a while. You know, Schmickiss, you really proved me wrong.”
“I did?”
“Yup. ‘Cause I’ll admit it: I wasn’t cheering when the company hired you. I was thinking of all the other old guys”—he checked himself—“I mean older guys, older guys, who I’ve been having to manage with unemployment so low. Sure, they take the job—until they find something else.
“But you . . .”
He punched his underling companionably in the shoulder.
“Hell, the way you conduct yourself—so alert, so energized—it's like working at Circuit World was your childhood dream or something.” He clapped once and peeled off towards his car. “And I want you to know, I appreciate it.
“Don’t totally understand it,” he called behind him, “but appreciate it.”
Marshall continued on to the farthest edge of the parking area, where, now that Brian had stopped to talk, he would be remaining for another hour until the next bus took him part of the way to his new basement.
And with nothing else to do, he looked up.
A few stars were poking through the light pollution, including Sirius, on whose fourth planet’s innermost moon a multi-tentacled cephalopod had asked what it was like to be the most famous life form in the Galaxy, before offering to marry him.
He felt the cephalopod might share Brian’s difficulty in understanding his current, positive outlook.
As might, come to think of it, about a trillion other sentients across the Milky Way.
But was that outlook really so hard to understand?
No. Not for someone who’d followed the events of his life, and recognized, as he had, that there were certain things he could hope for and certain others he could not.
Take marrying a person like Melody, for example.
If you were Marshall Shmishkiss, forget it.
Or making it as a writer.
If you were Marshall Shmishkiss, you could forget that, too.
And likewise with a host of accomplishments: becoming, say, a tech billionaire or a tech thousandaire or a NASA astronaut or . . .
If you were Marshall Shmishkiss? No, no and no. But was this a cause for disappointment? No! For as recent events had so clearly established, there existed a different category of achievements, and these he could aspire to.
In this category belonged the sorts of ambitions that other people abandoned by second grade as impractical and unrealistic. And so they were. For other people.
But not for Marshall M. Shmishkiss.
Because in the life of Marshall M. Shmishkiss, such ambitions, diligently pursued, ignited into actuality. They led to odysseys and epiphanies, bizarre encounters and even more bizarre triumphs, which the creators of companies and marryers of Melodies could never imagine happening, either to themselves or to anyone else.
And particularly not to a short, car-less, thirty-something sales clerk, who could be found, late on a weekend evening, in a bus shelter along a bleak stretch of commercial roadway.
The clerk, however, had no doubts. He knew another one was coming.
He had only to climb on and pay the fare.
There would be a fare, of course.
There would always be a fare.
But boy was it worth paying.
THE END