Just a little thing

- Will you look at this, Hank practically shouted.
Sev looked at him and then dropped her gaze
- It’s just a small thing, you shouldn’t worry about it. It doesn’t really matter that much.
She was trying to be consoling but it didn’t quite come out the way she wanted and Hank (the consistently falling hero of our story) was becoming even more agitated.
He glared at her, then at it, the source of his agitation.
She didn’t get it, couldn’t get it. Sev had came from elsewhere, she had witnessed, but never lived in the belly of the relentlessly turning machine. She had seen it, but never felt it roll over her, without consideration or compassion, like it rolled over anything and everything else in it’s path. It left no safe haven, no refuge. It was, if nothing else, unceasingly efficient.
- look at it, they don’t miss a beat, he declared.
They had been working out the dates and schedules of his kids, her kids, the back to school, back to work, end of summer crunch time. Hank had gone to get the calendar that he had hanging up by his desk, he had picked it up on the counter of the neighborhood deli his last time through the states. As he walked into the kitchen he had flipped the calendar to the month of september and there it was, just below and to the right of the stock photo of autumn foliage.

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- look at this, he cried to her.
He threw down the calendar he held in his hand. She saw it but didn’t know why it caused him such consternation. What she couldn’t see was that another small, innocent space of his childhood had been thrown into the maw of the machine. Another formerly public space had gotten confiscated for the never ending production of consumption.

Hank knew it was just a small thing. On it’s face, it was innocuous. A little block of text. A simple plug for a product on a free calender where once an aphorism or poem, an idea or reflection, engendered by the changing month or season had sat.

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.

-Emily Dickinson

- it’s all over.
- what, she asked softly
- the remembering when the merchants were locals and every single viewable space wasn’t calculated to engender a desire for consumption. When the bludgeoning was frowned upon and brutality was vulgar.

But our hero is doomed (it is this that makes him a hero) to remember the time when spaces existed which weren’t always ‘available for purchase’. When thoughts and discourse could exist without becoming products and brands. When silence wasn’t wasted space.