(It was summer 2007, and as a nineteen year old boy I was about to stay with family friends for the first time in the big city. As a country boy I had always been a bit shy when it came to girls and had not really even felt one up. This was about to change when I found something in the mall)
*
My silver blue Wolfhound bus slid into the outer city terminal. It was streaked with prairie dust and stank of hot diesel fumes. I had gotten on it at North Summit Junction, my hometown, four states to the west and was eager to find a restroom. With my backpack slung across one shoulder I walked through the crowded waiting area, past the pay-phone booths and taxi ranks, across a vast parking lot into the St.Clair Center Shopping Mall.
The stores were bustling with city folk in smart business suits and formal wear. There were also suburban wives with their young kids and a few matronly types. Grandmothers in sportswear and their overweight husbands wearing Red Sox caps shifted slowly around. There were well dressed middle-aged women leisure-shopping, moving in time to the incessant Country music. This was spilling out of hidden speakers in the tall lightweight roofed structure of the central atrium with its fountain.
Near the Antique Carousel I made my way to the restroom where I freshened up. Having washed my hands I noticed on the floor, next to some trash, a black cell-phone which someone had dropped. I picked it up and returned to the main concourse. I sat down and ate some potato chips while checking it out.
It was not a regular phone. It only had three buttons. 'FreezeTime' , 'SloMo' and 'RegularTime'.
"Shoot." I thought, "It's a freaking TV remote." I was just about to throw it away when I thought I'd have some fun while waiting for my family friends to collect me from outside Sears in about half an hour's time. I had a notion that if I could find a store selling electronic stuff I could cause some 'minor chaoses' by turning things off, switching channels etc and so forth.
"Well my friends," I thought as I walked into the 'First Circuits' electrical store "Here's Davy," smiling insanely, imagining I was Jack Nicholson. I wandered through the 'entertainment electronics suite' to where the large-screen HiDefinition TVs were located and sat down and watched an all-action DVD sampler showing some guy jumping off a moving truck onto an RUV and doing other stuff. This was a three minute loop and I watched it several times. The store was deserted.
A smartly dressed sales assistant wandered over. She was about 25 years of age, a few inches shorter than me, and had blonde hair styled like a lawyer. She wore a two piece red 'skirt-suit' over an appealing white plunging vee top. She had nice boobs. Her skirt was pleated and quite long and kind of flared. I thought it was too long for her age or height.
She looked fine to me, though, having never seen many women close to my age in my home town. My teenage zits used to put off any woman under thirty, or over thirty, for that matter. This sales assistant certainly was no 'Monet', not to me at least.
"Can I help you sir?" she enquired. I said I was just checking out the 'big-screens'. She clearly could see from my dusty denim clothes and backpack that I was an out-of-towner, probably a mallrat and that she was wasting her time. She stood next to me, her hand on the back of the sofa, watching the DVD with me, hoping she would embarrass me into leaving.
I felt around, in my back pack, for my newly acquired remote and secretly pressed the FreezeTime button and watched the guy on the truck remain suspended in mid air. I smiled, turned round and looked up at her expecting her to apologise for the technical hitch.
To my amazement she just stood there with a fixed expression on her face, her mouth partly open. I told to her that the TV had a fault and grinned again. She remained fixed in the same position with a frozen appearance on her face as if she had suddenly become a living statue. No way had she had a seizure or else she would be writhing about on the deck and screaming off. She stayed like this for at least a couple of minutes.
"Miss, miss, MISS!" I said loudly, thinking she would suddenly revive. "Do me a favour and wake up or something." I became quite worried but had not figured out that it may have been my remote that could have caused this situation. I needed to get help. Looking around the store I saw another assistant sitting at her desk in front of a computer similarly dressed to the first one.
I ran over to her, weaving around the display units. The screen was down and her hands were motionless on the keyboard. "Miss, miss?" I moved my hands in front of her face and snapped my fingers several times but there was no reaction. I pushed her, but it was like pushing against solid cement. Although her clothes seemed to move, her body was completely stiff and unyielding.
