On a road outside Cairo
New Jersey, not Egypt...
There stands a souvenir stand filled with stones and bottle caps. Now at first glance this is just junk, but when you look closer, deeper, into the wares you can see your soul. Everything of your life; the good, the bad, and the things you wish most to forget.
In times of old a kindly person owned the stand, but those days have passed and now it is a trap for the unaware and for those tricked easily tricked.
This is the story of one of the innocents that the stand now possesses�
Jenna lee had a long drive ahead of her. In two days she had to drive all the way to Junction Gap to visit her grandpa before he passed. They had never been too close but she had to see him one last time.
Her gas gauge was drifting toward empty and her bladder was headed toward full, in other words it was time for a rest stop. Just as she starts to think about how the road is deserted and that she will have to call for help she sees a small stand off the side of the road. Maybe they could help her and she wouldn�t have to use up all her money on out of calling area cell phone bills.
So Jenna gets out of her car in the middle of nowhere with map in hand and asks a gentle looking old man behind a convenient souvenir stand for use of his phone, some gas, a toilet, or at least directions to the nearest station.
The kindly looking old man looks up from his newspaper and smiles...�Sure I will help you out, Kiddo,� he says, �but there is a catch. Oh, don�t worry all you have to do is buy one of my trinkets. One dollar and you get a nice souvenir.�
Jenna thinks that this old man must be crazy to give such a deal to a desperate woman, but hey, she was getting more out of the deal than he was so it was all good. She gives the gentle looking old man the dollar and takes the gas and the nice new bottle cap he gives her.
She looks at the cap, �Yep, old man is off his rocker. A bottle cap how worthless,� she thinks. As Jenna gazes at the cap in contempt she starts to feel sick. The world seems to fall away from her, like someone took a bat to the whole world and broke it into millions of pieces.
Before she can scream or even open her mouth she is back on the day her life changed, the day she was still running from, the day she knew she could never leave behind.
Jenna always was a troublemaker, always the black sheep of the family. She hated what she knew her father, the solider, must think of her. Always skipping school, in trouble with drugs, and the law. Her mom just thought it was a "stage", but Jenna knew better. She was what every family had to have; she was serving a grand cosmic purpose: the bad apple, the black sheep. That�s what she thought, that�s what she knew, until, that is, until, her father got involved where he didn�t have to be�until he got himself killed.
God why did he have to be at the shop that day? Why did I have to go along with hank's crazy idea? Why? Why was I so reckless?
But he did, and I did, and I was, and so he is in a coffin�and I�m here, wherever here is. Man life is a mess.
The scene of Jenna�s failure keep replaying before her. The time she stole her mom�s wedding ring to pawn for concert ticket. Her first smoke. Her first drink. The first time she stole from a store. And worst of all over and over the funeral and the hold up that caused it.
WHY DID HE HAVE TO FOLLOW ME?
The old man leans back in his chair and laughing a laugh like a rusty hinge...another twig for the fire, another black flower for his field. Oh, how satisfyingly sweet is the honey of regret.
Arielle Griffin
Redone 10-04