by Gary Fincke
Once, discovering a crying child, a man knelt to ask that girl the lost-questions–her name and who had mislaid her in Gimbel’s, a store that featured thirteen floors of merchandise. In that center-city department store, toys were above everything but furniture, but the man and child were on the first floor among perfume and cosmetics and well-dressed saleswomen who offered samples adjacent to jewelry, where every purchase was first seen under locked-down glass. Additional security, like that girl’s mother, was secretive or somewhere else, but that girl clutched the man’s hand and walked with him so close to an escalator, an elevator, and a revolving door that the man half-expected an abduction alert. The air near the samples was funereal, the shoppers mostly old women who had driven to the city since World War II, so few of them by the 1980s that the store was rumored bankrupt. No one was hailing that girl or him, not even, as he looked for the Information desk, they passed the gilded, outside doors where what he wished impossible was a step away. A woman, at last, said she recognized her granddaughter’s face, an easy claim to trust, judging by her words and gestures, believing they verified her identity with the vocabulary of panic and relief until her voice pitched so high into accusation that the morning paused and locked as if it needed a password to continue.
Gary Fincke’s latest flash collection is The History of the Baker’s Dozen (Pelekinesis, 2024). He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.
