The green caught his eye, a nauseous, faded, never-gonna-be a-crayon green.
It was a snack food, on a small wire pole jutting from a dusty piece of corkboard in a store perched on a rusty piece of Tireman Avenue.
The snack was dried apple chips. Dill pickle flavor.Â
Didn’t make sense.
But they were marked down and he was marked down and if a human can feel a kinship with a 6 ounce bag of an ill-wrought snack, this was it.
After the purchase, he realized the snack had passed the expiration date.
He looked for mold and found none.
He sniffed, and they smelled weird, but he figured they were supposed to smell weird.
Stuffing a dirty hand into the bag, he pulled out a few, bigger than a quarter, smaller than a fifty cent piece.
They were okay, not perfect.
They soaked some bile.
The freeway hiss made him look up.
When he was young and perfect he had briefly been on a billboard on that freeway.
He could sing, he could dance, and apparently he could hit a woman with a phone, backhand, from across a hotel suite.Â
They found another young, perfect, good looking man to take his place.Â
The guys in the group, they didn’t keep in touch.
Why would they?
They were cobbled together, strangers united by decent voices and great cheekbones.
Some were rich and some were in rehab and he was on Tireman Avenue, blissfully unknown, because all he would be known for would be the hotel room.
His legacy, if he had one, was distilled into one stupid moment.
He stared, where the billboard used to be. His face there for a moment, but even the stanchion was gone.
The expiration date on the chips stared back.
The pole in the store, pierced through the small hole in the puke green plastic, was full.Â
The chips would hang there, unwanted, probably never meant to be in the first place.
A mistake.
He went back to buy a few more bags, wondering why, and how, they determined an expiration date.
***
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Somehow, you made me feel sympathy for that abusive guy..
That is an amazing feat of literature. Or, a character flaw in me. Or, a little of both
Expirations, like deadlines, do accomplish getting things shuffled, moved out and moved on.
Once or twice, an expiration got me to buy some expired product at a reduced price.
Meanwhile, I'm still ticking on towards the expiration date only God knows.