‘Twas the advent of Christmas, and profits were up— not a store remained empty, not even the Build-A-Chair workshop! Ordinarily occupied only by the odd Amish boy, the gift giving season stuffed the saw-dusty store with confused and be-splintered children. Little boys and girls wrapped in anoraks like plushy drooling goblins, screamed and scampered with jack planes, stigmata’d themselves with fishtail chisels, and tucked secret hearts into the armrests and seat cushions of freshly varnished rocking chairs and recliners.
What a magically lucrative time it was to own retail properties! The gargantuan parking lot, with its Everests of plowed snow, was packed to burst with the very finest gas-guzzling minivans and SUVs money could buy! There were Hummers and Goliaths, Land Rovers and Leviathans, and the all new BMW Panzerkampfwagen, a six-wheel-drive SUV so large it steamrolls entire soccer teams of children like a dream! From the depths of the most abominable suburbs, a tsunami of parents drove through the dark and sparkley storm of Christmas lights to deliver their hellspawn into the lap of a minimum wage Santa— the fat man himself— jolly ol’ Saint Nick— Kris Kringle— Père Noël— Father Christmas— Sinterklaas— サンターさん— if you will. There he sat on a wintery throne before the largest pine tree plastic manufactures could assemble, orbited by a candy-colored choo-choo train packed with infants. Round and round they went, hour after hour, day after day, clanging the bell nonstop! A chaotic carnival of Christmas! A palatable pandemonium of sugarplums and peppermint bark! Tell the strange man what toys you want, Timmy! And be hasty about it, Sbarro is closing!
But not everyone came to the mall for a rendezvous with Santa Claus or for accruing copious amounts of credit card debt! Over yonder, by the lacey lingerie shop, lingering in the soft glow of electric sex, two degenerate high school boys admired the colossal window display of a scantily-clad supermodel. These underage connoisseurs of the female form regarded her waifish figure with every bit of scrutiny and admiration as a pensive art collector. Her airbrushed body tangled in contortions across a Christmas colored sofa, shooting sexy eyes at the camera with laser precision. Good ol’ Ruslana Korshunova. She really knows how to sell semi-transparent bras and panties. May she rest in peace.
"That doesn't make any goddamn sense at all," Peter said.
Kevin knocked him in the nuts and said, “That's because you're a dumbass. What's not to get?”
“King Arthur is not a girl.” Peter defensively swatted away his hit below the belt. “King Arthur cannot be your waifu.”
“But what if King Arthur was a girl?”
Peter crammed a cookie into his mouth like a squirrel and when he spoke he spewed crumbs, “But he isn’t.”
“Well in this story he is.”
“So it’s an alternate reality?”
“No. He’s just a girl now,” Kevin said while nibbling at his cookie.
“Okay, so what’s his name? It’s not Arthur, right?” Peter chucked his Mrs. Fields wrapper into a trash bin.
“Artoria.”
“That’s Arthur! It’s just Latin!”
“No! It’s a female name, it ends in an A.”
“That’s Spanish, ya ding-dong! Latin doesn't have the feminine A.”
“You’re so fucking wrong! Latin female names do end in A. It’s like the difference between Christopher and Christina. Arthur in Latin would be Artorius or something. My god, Peter, you're like legitimately retarded or something!”
“At least I’m not in love with King Arthur, you fairy queen fudge packer!”
A bobcut soccer mom with shopping bags in tow caught the tail end of Peter and Kevin’s conversation and grimaced at them. Peter sneered and shook his head at her as if to say, ‘what, Karen McTalks-to-the-Manager? I'm not talking to you.’
“Oh my god!” Kevin’s palm flew up to his face in frustration. “Look. You’re over thinking it. It’s just what they do in Japan. They take a thing and they turn it into a cute girl. Battleships? Now it’s personified battleship waifus. Lovecraftian elder gods? Cthulhu waifus. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Now he’s a waifu too. Horse racing? Now it’s horse racing waifus. Your waifu may be a horse, but it’s not bestiality.”
“Mm...” Peter disagreed with the 'not bestiality' thing but didn't know how to articulate it any further than a disgusted look.
“What time is it?”
Peter looked at his watch. It was still too early. He twisted his head around and searched the crowds for his blind date, but he had no clue who he was supposed to find.
“Ten more minutes until she’s late,” Peter said.
“Let me see her photo.”
Peter fished his smartphone out from his breast pocket and opened Tindr. He pulled up her profile and showed it to Kevin. Her photo was nothing more than a single eye, heavily adorned with glitter makeup and digital blingeez.
“Well... she certainly has a pretty... eye.”
He flipped through the rest of her profile photos. There was a French fruit tart— a kaleidoscope of sugar-glazed berries, kiwis, and bananas, snapped from a restaurant. And another picture of a fluffy sleeping kitty cat, presumably not downloaded from the internet.
“Why do girls take pictures of their dumb food?” Peter asked.
“Why the fudge did you match with her? You have no idea what she looks like. She could be a landwhale.”
Peter shrugged. “It’s a risk.” He looked at the photo of her eye again and wondered if you could tell a girl’s weight by her eyelids and eyebrow alone. “Worst case scenario I have one bad date with Quasimoda.”
“One bad date? If you get catfished tell her to go liposuction herself to death.”
“I don't care what she looks like. Okay? She's the only match who agreed to meet me, so I'm going to meet her. That's it. Here, look.”
Peter showed off his matches with other girls. While the profiles were less sketchy, the conversations were short and irregular. One word replies with hours or an entire day between them, then ghosted off into the eternal void of left on read. Kevin flipped through their heavily doctored and filtered photos. Stupid dog snout stickers hiding real noses, penciled on cat whiskers, photoshopped and overexposed, middle fingers, faces hidden behind books, under veils of hair, backs turned to the camera, parfaits, chocolate cakes, and tiny Michelin star desserts on large white plates. If this was the dating scene it made Kevin want to kill himself.
“How’s my hair look?” Peter looked at his reflection in the lingerie shop window and adjusted his posture: chest out and shoulders back like a gorilla on the hunt.
“Yeah it’s fine. Looks like it always does.”
It was six o’clock. Peter looked around for his date. A smörgåsbord of shoppers swirled around him. Families and children and friends with freshly purchased presents in tow. All headed towards their perfect Christmas morning. He searched among the sea of winter jackets for a girl all alone, looking shy, dressed for a date, searching back through the crowd for him. She must be close, he thought. His heart quickened. His first real date. He wondered how long their relationship would last. Would it fizzle out in a week, like oh-so-many high school flings, or would it sustain itself? Would he one day, years from now, be taking her to senior prom? Would they go to the same college together? Would he hit the jackpot and have the much coveted high school sweetheart turned wife? The perfect romantic story that he heard retold again and again in movies and tv?
Little did Peter know, chapter one of this story would not end happily ever after. And his December date was soon to take a disastrous twist into ruination— sure to mentally scar him for years to come. Oh, the horrors of blind dating! What emotional trauma awaits our braindead hero in chapter two?!