Mark

Seen at Obscura Antiques & Oddities in New York City at about 2 p.m., Sunday, January 20^th, 2013

I’ve never seen her before. Her hair is perfect, but colored hair alone doesn’t make for good TV. She might be new in the neighborhood. Or she might be a tourist. Probably a tourist. She and her friend don’t look like they’re searching for anything in particular. Still, if they are…. When in doubt, flirt. “Hi, ladies. Is there anything I can help you find?” Damn. Her smile makes her even better. She really would look great on camera. “Thanks. We like the show, too. So you’re from Chicago. What’s the store like this called there? The Wooly Mammoth?” Yeah, this isn’t going to work. They clearly don’t know anything about collecting. What a shame. I think she’s into me, though. Still got it. “That’s just a prop gun. It was probably used for theater and the like.” She’s a theater kid? I should have known. “Right, it’d probably still be difficult to get it on a plane.” I’ve dated theater kids before. They’re bad news. They’re insane. They make a big deal out of everything. What’s that phrase? Mountains out of molehills. I mean, Mandy broke up with me just because she found out I wasn’t going to be on camera on the show. It’s not like I couldn’t have hooked her up, but she left anyway. Ungrateful bitch. “The small bat is thirty-five, and they go up from there. The skeleton is fifty-five.” Yeah, I was all wrong about her. Petrified bat? How stereotypical is that? I hate people who live for shock value. “You’re going to go with the pin-up-girl glasses? I like these a lot. Make sure you don’t put it in the dishwasher, though, or the sticker will come off.” Ugh, she’s still smiling at me a little too much for my taste. Better put some distance there. “I know. I have a collection of shot glasses that I get whenever I travel, and I came home once to find my girlfriend scrubbing away at one, and she’s like, ‘I’ve been trying to get this gross stuff off the rim forever.” But it was a gold rim! It was supposed to be there. She totally ruined it.” There, that should do it. “Okay, that’ll be seventy all together. Cash or credit?” Too bad. She’s just weird-hot enough. The producers would have loved her. “Hot chocolate? You could try Café Pick Me Up. It’s just a few blocks south on Avenue A. Has a cool atmosphere.” Well, at least I could help them get an AUTHENTIC NEW YORK EXPERIENCE, or whatever you want to call it. Good deed for the day: completed. “Thanks again, ladies. Take some postcards on your way out.”

I feel a little bad about this story, because Mark was a really nice person, and this story makes him seem like a jerk. I don't think he is a jerk. But I wanted to write a story in the form of someone's inner monologue, and the fun of inner monologues is that they say things we'd never say out loud. Meg was the girl with the cool hair and I was her friend, obviously. Does this format work? Could you figure out that it was his inner monologue and the portions in quotations were the things he said aloud? Feedback is always appreciated.