“Thank you,” Tamsin said and the ShopGirl nodded her head once, efficiently. They weighed almost nothing, Tamsin thought as she took the bag. She handed Tamsin a plastic bag with the bag of butterscotch candies inside of it. It beeped once and the transaction went through. The ShopGirl slid the card through the scanner. The cost was seventy-three credit dollars. Sometimes she woke up screaming and was delighted to find that she could still scream. Tamsin knew this and understood it, but sometimes she dreamed of those stitched up mouths. Talking slows transactions was a motto of the Mall. The stiches done to keep her mouth shut were also in pink thread. The ShopGirl wore a pink jumper and her hair was in a braid, tied off with pink ribbon. Placing the candies on the store’s counter, she watched as the ShopGirl rang them up. She would give them to some of the Mall children when she saw them. She bought a pound of butterscotches, though they were too cloying for her. It tasted sweet and effervescent, like a flavor that would never stay on the tongue for long, and it never did. Tamsin liked the different flavors that the companies imagined up.

The first shop of the morning sold candy. Was it like Ray-bit or Rab-bit or something else entirely? She had reached out and touched it, reading the tag as she did so, Rabbit, and wondering how to pronounce the word. She remembered staring at one of the puppets: its flopsy ears, four legs, and gray fur. There was the toy store with the large selection of fantastical creature puppets that she had been in when her parents left her. There was the kitchenware’s store she had bought a knife in on the day that her sister was taken. She sometimes soothed herself to sleep at night, when her feet were aching from walking and she could hear cash registers still dinging echoes in her ears, by trying to remember what shop she had been in at various points in her life. She tried to calculate how many sections she had covered since she had begun shopping but it seemed like an infinite amount. Tamsin was almost to a new section of the Mall. She must have built up enough credit by now. She’d been preparing for years and was in the best shape of her life. That wasn’t as many as some but it was more than many. She tried, always, to cover at least 17 shops each day. She woke, she showered, she ate, and then she shopped. Tamsin woke up at seven am, on the dot, every morning.

Escaping the Body by Chloe N. Clark