#Select a Business Name for Your Bakery

[metaphortunes]

Howdy friends, I’ve written a few short stories that I wanted to throw out into the ether. And I went back and tagged all my previous writing posts with the tag “metaphortune writes” for easy finding!

Here’s a short story about small towns, the priorities of young people, the sweetness of summer, and siblings. I didn’t edit it at all so my apologies in advance for any grammar failures!

The Big Slush machine went out on Sunday, April 14th, 2005. If we’re being honest here, it was the only reason my sister and I went to Johnson’s Fuel Mart. Their soda fountain tasted like it dumped about as much plastic into every cup as it did soda syrup. Their candy was tremendously overpriced, they had 1 brand of chips, Big Harold’s, and they cleaned the floors about once every 2 years. But the Big Slushes were heaven.

Suffice to say, April 14th was the end of an era for us. Each passing week we drifted farther and farther from knowing those floors like the back of our hands. Our ability to use the Big Slush machine with surgical precision faded and we reverted to slushie peasants. Mona, the main evening clerk slowly forgot our names, and our allowances stayed in our pockets more than ever.

One Tuesday, July 14th, I walked to Frantz Park down on Alpine Road. The benches were covered in droplets of a syrupy, sappy resin from a tree I’d never learned the name of. After sitting on the 40-year-old swings for a while, rusty chains and all, I walked through the outfield of the baseball diamond.

There was a windstorm that blew through town on July 12th, so it was no surprise when, deep into center-field, I saw a few pieces of trash had blown into the grass. A 3ft long Walgreens receipt, a fast food wrapper, and the item that caught my attention. A full two months after the Big Slush machine went out, there it was. In pristine condition, a clear plastic Big Slush cup. 34 fluid ounces with a flared rim. No lid, no straw, just the cup.

Obviously, I was elated. I picked up the cup and started fast-walking home. Throughout the walk my mind was fixated on what I believed to be the one possible explanation for how the pristine Big Slush cup came to be there: somewhere in our 15 stoplight town, there was a new Big Slush machine.

Nora shared my enthusiasm for the cup, but was more skeptical of my hypothesis. Realistically speaking, there weren’t many other places that would’ve had the machine. Not to mention, would they have the good flavors? Blue Raspberry, White Cherry, and Cola? Would it even be worth it if the machine had the disappointment of Grape or the medicine taste of Strawberry? It was purely speculation, but our teenage minds raced.

The next day, geared up with a list of all the businesses we thought could have a Big Slush machine, we set out to find it. First, we walked up State Route 117 to the small grocery, Three Bear Market. No luck there, but they were having a sale on gum. Blowing giant, sticky bubbles, we walked to the next business. Cutting across the alley between State Route 117 and Terrence Street, we made it to McAllen’s Bakery. No luck there, but the owner was very nice and complimented our backpacks.

We took Terrence Street to Alpine Road and stopped for a short break at Frantz Park. The benches were still sappy, the swings were still rusty. Funny how things don’t change overnight. We walked the outfield of the baseball diamond looking for any other pieces of evidence, but alas, there was no trash to be found. That’s probably good in the grand scheme of things, but we were disappointed.

Walking through the streets with Nora was a slightly blissful experience. Not quite a full on sort of bliss where everything in the world is great and nothing ever hurts; but a soft, warm filter on everything. That’s the benefit of having a good relationship with your older sibling, having them around is like a blanket of security. Nothing can ever go THAT wrong when they’re with you.

We’d taken Alpine to First, then First to Reagan. On Reagan was the first gas station built in town, the Marathon, formerly known as the Brachston Pump Station. Marathon bought it up in 1996, installed all new pumps, remodeled the inside, and removed any character the building had had. Oh, and they didn’t have a Big Slush machine. Probably worth mentioning that.

From the Marathon on Reagan, we walked a block or so down the Walgreens. Walgreens having a slushie was a long shot, but didn’t pharmacies used to have soda fountains back in the day? It wasn’t THAT absurd. We wandered around the building to find exactly zero Big Slush machines. The clerks, disenchanted college dropouts, paid exactly zero attention to us.

The last place we tried was the only other gas station in town, Stop-N-Go. We had to walk the entire rest of the way down Reagan to where it dead-ended into Marshall Street and walk Marshall Street until it dead-ended into Montgomery Avenue. That all ends up being about a mile’s walk, but we were determined. We entered through the oddly heavy steel and glass door and asked the clerk. They didn’t have one.

However, the clerk, Henry, was also a fan. Or at least pretended to like them. As a favor to the owner, Henry worked one night at the other Stop-N-Go, about 4 miles away in Hallston back in 2003. He remembered them having a slushie machine, but couldn’t remember what type. We figured that even if it was there in 2003, it probably wasn’t there today, and slunk out of the store. But Henry came out after us and said “let me call the other store and ask them for you, alright?”

The clerk on the other end seemed very confused, but eventually was able to confirm the news we were so adamant on receiving: they had a Big Slush machine in working order! We expressed our joy and gratitude to Henry after he hung of the phone, he said he was “stoked it worked out for you.” We were stoked too, Henry.

We took Montgomery down to Fourth and ended up back home. Our parents wouldn’t be home from work for a few hours, which gave us time to plot exactly how we’d ask them to drive us 4 miles to go to a gas station. The plotting was all for naught, as they were tremendously unimpressed. “Next time we’re out that way, we’ll go” they said. But the reality of the situation was that we’d only been to Hallston a few times. It was in the opposite direction of Wrexham, the small city we’d go to from time to time.

Luckily, Nora remembered a fact that I had failed to remember. The rails-to-trails bike path that went through our town also went through Hallston. Neither of us were really that interested in biking, but if it meant getting a Big Slush? We’d have biked 20 miles one way. We got our bikes out for the first time in weeks that day, inflated the tires, tested our helmets, and set off.

Four miles is a hell of a bike ride when you haven’t biked in weeks. It was all flat land surrounded by farmer’s fields, but it was still 4 miles in the heat of July. Luckily, we had a frosty goal to keep our minds set on. Whenever we faltered or slowed down, the other would just say “Big Slush!!!” in a sort of TV commercial announcer voice. After a half an hour or so, we made it to the Hallston. Neither of us really knew where the Stop-N-Go was, but we fortune favored us. A Stop-N-Go fuel truck was stopping-n-going at the the traffic light near the bike path. We sped to follow it.

The truck took a left onto the state route and turned into the Stop-N-Go. Success! We found ourselves in the parking lot, shouting “Big Slush!!!” at each other in the aforementioned voice. We opened the surprisingly light (or just well maintained) steel and glass door and saw a large sign hanging from the ceiling that said “DRINKS” in Comic Sans. We walked towards the sign and found our holy grail. The Big Slush machine.

There it sat on a red counter, humming away and constantly rotating the slush inside. Condensation sat on the plastic windows to view each of the three flavors churning, and we parsed the flavor selection. Strawberry (aka medicine), Grape (aka disappointment), and White Cherry. As Meatloaf didn’t say: 1 out of 3 ain’t bad. But as we approached the machine, our hearts sunk. The White Cherry flavor was out of order.

We literally ran to the counter to ask the incredibly confused clerk what was happening and when it would be fixed. There was an error with the ratios of the newest White Cherry syrup batches which made the slushies too hard to fit through a straw. We begged the clerk to just turn it on and let us have some, we didn’t care that they’d be hard, we didn’t care how long it’d take, and we’d wait around; but the clerk refused.

Ultimately, we’d come too far for this to happen. We were going to drink a Big Slush and that was going to be the end of it. We swallowed our unhappiness and decided to get the flavors of medicine and disappointment. I got the Grape, Nora got the Strawberry. Honestly, they were not great. The Grape still tasted like the inside of a shoe, and the Strawberry still tasted like it was a slushie version of children’s liquid ibuprofen. But they still quenched a primal desire in us. Can you call a desire for a slushie a primal desire? Sure, why not.

The rest of the summer break, we’d bike to Hallston two or three times a week. Biking got easier each time we went, the rides got quicker, we had to shout “Big Slush!!!” at each other less. The White Cherry flavor never came back, but we learned to appreciate the Grape and Strawberry flavors. If we mixed the two, it almost tasted good for some reason. Grape and Strawberry isn’t exactly a combination you’d expect to taste cohesive and fulfilling, and yet, here we were.

Eventually the school year and extra-curriculars caught up with us and we were lucky to make it to the Hallston Stop-N-Go once a week. Our enthusiasm never waned, though. Each time, we hoped that they’d have finally gotten another flavor to replace the White Cherry, and yet, even a year after, they hadn’t. Strawberry and Grape. Medicine and Disappointment. Nora and Jamie.