my first time participating in @flashfictionfridayofficial, so here is a little bitty thingy of a thing (569)!
‘Woah,’ exhaled Reese. ‘Can’t remember the last time I’ve seen one of these.’
Maddie shuffled up behind him and leaned over his shoulder. She was trying to not smear his t-shirt with mint chocolate chip ice cream, the scoop sitting on the cone and not being levelled into it yet.
‘A gumball machine? Really? They are still around’.
It didn’t contain gum or at least, it did not seem like it did – the glossy ball stored its own little copies inside it. Besides the size, what stood in the way of the spheres being a perfect replica was the mirky, non-transparent plastic. You can see clearly into the mother ball, but not into the baby balls, leaving their contents an even tinier mystery.
‘Not around me, then,’ Reese slid his hand into his tight jean pocket and came up empty. ‘Got any quarters to feed it?’
Maddie checked her windbreaker, a tricky thing to do with one hand, and there was some change as well as lint. Reese picked one coin up from her open palm.
It grew strangely quiet in the ice cream parlor, but it was hardly peculiar. Reese’s mind had a tendency to tune everything out when caught in the grips of excitement, and recently it’s been coming from unexpected places. Reese wasn’t that into ice cream anyway, it gave him a brain freeze, and his choice was always chocolate, in which case, he might as well cut out the middleman and get something from a corner shop.
He turned the lever and the machine crunched up the coin, as if digesting it. Barely a moment later, something hit the bottom and the flap jittered just a touch. He lifted it and held up the item, studying carefully before twisting to disconnect the halves. His finger pried out a small scrap of paper, and it was starting to feel more like a fortune cookie.
‘For a quarter?’ Maddie blew some raspberries with her lips. ‘Capitalism.’
‘1984,’ he read out loud.
‘That’s neat,’ said Reese, undecided if he should feel disappointment. ‘It’s a book recommendation.’
‘You can just search for goodreads or something,’ Maddie headed back towards the door, but something put her stride to a halt. Reese figured it must have been the brain freeze catching up.
‘This door didn’t used to be pink,’ she said instead.
Reese let out a pensive hum, because, truly, he couldn’t pinpoint the exact colour it’d been, but there was definitely something different about it. The air had shifted, too, and he noticed a strange whiff of cotton candy in the air. Tracing it, he turned around to the rest of the parlor, but it wasn’t exactly how they’d - almost - left it.
It was utterly vacant, in discordance with the weekend rush hour. Even the server they knew from school, not by name, but still, was nowhere to be seen. The interior looked all the more striking in this absence – the plastic sitting had morphed into cushiony, marshmallow-y sofas, paired with tables with painted sprinkles all over. In the corner next to the bathroom, a wooden jukebox was false-starting a tune, like an engine that kept failing. Checkered tiles of the floor tied the whole picture together, despite being so unbelievably tacky, or, perhaps, thanks to being fittingly tacky.
‘Holy…’ was the only thing that came out of Maddie.
‘So,’ her friend followed up. ‘Not a book recommendation.’