You Get What You Pay For?

Things seemed full, busy, colorful, vibrant. She liked to cook – especially mussels, scallops, any kind of seafood, to which she could add sauces tart and sweet, drizzling oil and all manner of concoctions she created, just imagining what her taste buds would like, listening to them as she closed her eyes and thought of the pools of green – pesto-laden ponds, sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds, ginger vinaigrette mixed with pomegranate seeds. She liked French toast, the fat slices of bread cooked in butter until golden, then sprinkled with brown sugar and some caramelized molasses, to add that dark, bitterness to the light sweetness of the brown sugar. The toast itself transported her into so many memories of flavors, and that fantastic urge she had to make new flavors. Ah, food. Her tennis shoes, her walkers, that is, loomed in her mind’s eye at times, the shoe-lace eyes appearing in her mind, open as a porthole, and the texture of the blue weave large and magnified and glistening with the water she walked through the last time she wore them. Pulsing and growing, the images came and went. The same with sounds. The life of the mind is rich, she thought. And she knew this was part of her attraction to advertising: the glossy rich colors in pictures done just so, the text needing to sharp, tight, just right for whiz-kids and people-on-the-go. She sometimes felt she was a subway car that never stopped. The subway car was fast becoming the electric high-speed rail without her ever getting off. The neon lights of the billboards beneath the ground, or in the subway tunnels, blurred into streaks like the sunset sometimes, or lightening bolts as a storm builds.

She was average size, with big, heavy limbs, though she didn’t feel fat. Her flesh felt heavy and soft a lot, and at those times she felt as though she were moving underwater. Did she see bubbles? This seemed a normal way of perceiving herself, because that was her continuing way of relating to her world.

What’s the point of advertising? To get attention. To satisfy a need. To make money. To persuade why just this thing, this service, this product is what someone needs. Truth or charlatan. “You get what you pay for.” Is it that the best things don’t need to be advertised, just to be shared?

(an excerpt from new story)