keyword "mahogany" title "opening salvo" in misc. flash fiction

Don’t hit on the cute girl in the Salvation Army, Mike, just don’t. Nothing good will come from this and you know it. Seriously, get yourself together, you know that nothing about that idea can possibly turn out well. What is your end-game here? A date in the corner of the store with all the old copies of The Secret that were dumped off at the second-hand shop because it turned out that, no, you can’t turn your life around by telling yourself that your life is turning around? The power of positive-thinking only works for people who sell books about positive-thinking, everyone else just ends up losing the price of the book because they give it away to a thrift-stop. That’s more or less how this situation would play out too, Mike, let it go.

Don’t hit on the cute girl in the Salvation Army, it seems like a good idea right now, lonely and longing under the sick fluorescent green glow of these track-lit skies at two in the afternoon on this beige-hearted summer Wednesday, but please just don’t hit on the cute girl in the Salvation Army, Mike. She is shopping in the Ilion Salvo on a Wednesday at two, the odds are she is just as bungled and botched and damaged as you, no matter how much you imagine sharing sweet nothings with her side-by-side on the mahogany couch, on the scuffed gently-used Naugahyde.

Don’t hit on the cute girl in the Salvation Army, Mike, you’re unemployed in your thirties for God’s sake, you’re there to scrape up ironic so-bad-its-good B-movies for kicks, you own over
thirty copies of Jerry Maguire on VHS tape. This is where life has deposited you, skating through the Ilion Salvo purchasing something called “Death Bed: The Bed That Eats” and something else called “The Ninja Destroyer” for seventy-four cents each, can you even imagine how much more weird and desperate her life must be? What brought her here, only God knows, but even more so than you, it seems like she’s there to buy herself clothes. No matter how comely that lady seems or how she resembles something from your dreams, the best-case scenario would be a grand train wreck for two, you can’t handle your own life, what would happen to you together?

So, don’t hit on the girl in the Salvation Army, it could only end badly. Don’t hit on the girl in the Salvation Army, she’s probably as crazy as hell. Don’t hit on the girl in the Salvation Army, your disasters wouldn’t merely add up, they would multiply, they would interact exponentially even if she wouldn’t mean it intentionally. People who drift through places like these at times like these, when everyone not set to self-destruct is at work, can only make each other worse.

I mean, of course you should, she’s almost impossibly lovely but you are a coward at heart, aren’t you, Mike, so your cowardice saves you again from the risk of living.