The young Daniel Ames stepped out of his car, and checked his pocket to make sure that he had his wallet. When he found it, he shut his door, and it was then that he faced the Big Store. He looked far ahead of him at it, across the busy parking lot with its blobs of humanity clamoring about for parking and shopping carts. He had parked far away from the low yet imposing structure, since there was no parking that was closer. The statue of capitalism was made of ugly yet vaguely attractive gray bricks and was adorned with blue colors. Yes, the blue that distinguished it from the store with the red. When you walked into the store everyone was all in blue, and blue was everywhere. When you walked into the other one down the street, everything was all red instead. To think people cared which one they went to.

Ames felt a deep foreboding working within him as he faced the store, and he looked up at the sky. Yes, perhaps it was the sky that made him feel this way. It was a deep gray, and the clouds rolled sluggishly, in no rush unlike the humans below it. They seemed to take some perverse pleasure in their slowness, since perhaps they enjoyed their brief triumph over the life-giving sun. Ames looked up at them, his hands in his pockets, cars driving by him in a vain attempt to find parking closer to the Great Store. He envied people flying in airplanes high above the clouds, since the sky up there was blue and vibrant, with the sun making the cloud layer below look like a field of comfy white pillows. Down here, however, as Ames was sucked forward by the gravitational pull of Capitalism, he was left to gaze up at the ugly gray underbellies of these same white pillows.

He decided to move along, since after all he had to go to work very soon, and he still needed to do some shopping. He began to walk toward the Great Store, his hands still in his pockets, his keen eyes darting around searching for something to compelling to latch on to. It had rained recently, and he could hear all around him the tires of people's cars swishing in dirty puddles. He was close enough to the Pull that there were people around. They walked back from the Commercial Megalopolis with heavy bags of blue, with their cheap purchases within. Cheap purchases that had cost them a lot. Ames watched them, watched their drooping cheeks, their bland eyes, their fat noses, their penguin bodies dressed in clothes that didn't match. He saw them heft their swollen frames into decent vehicles, turning the key and hearing their decent engine come to life, turning on their radios to listen to the decent radio programs with the intent to drive off and eat some decent fast food shit. That was it, he supposed. Everything here was decent. Nothing was truly bad. Nothing was truly exciting. Everything a steady fucking decent. A steady boring, yet a steady comfort that dulled people enough not to care.

Ames looked ahead at the Great Store, and it was then that he realized where his earlier sense of foreboding had come from. It wasn't the sky necessarily. He looked on at the broad storefront, and he saw its different sets of doors for people to enter. He saw all of the out-of- shape people walking and waddling and loafing in and out of the Store, and it was then that he felt a great sense of unease come into him. The huge white logo stood out in front of the store like the grand Roman Eagle that the barbarians saw before they were cut down by the Legions.

He stopped there, like that, with the cars and people and the blue things moving all around him in this great gray battlefield underneath these impersonal clouds in this impersonally decent country. He faced his destination with a feeling of dread, for this Great Store looked to him like the gates of Hell, swallowing the souls that went into it with "good deals" and "money-back guarantees" and fucking "90 day warranties". Why was he going in if he realized this threat? What was he doing here in this system that warranted such blatant theft of human vitality? Why was he going to feed this hideously obese demon that winked at people with its silly goddamn yellow smiley face that hid its black heart of avarice?

He took a step toward the Wal-Mart, and one step became two, and then three, and then many, and then he was in its mouth and the fangs were in. It was convenient for him to go there, after all.

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A/N: Naturally I'm open to any sort of compliment or criticism, and I will appreciate any sort of feedback as to what you think the whole idea behind this story is.

~ Breto Pura Maya.