Amanda's Holiday Shopping Trip [WTB]

‘Tis the season to be jolly, and for a confirmed shopaholic like Amanda, it really was the most wonderful time of year, as that old song puts it. With a spring in her step and a smile on her face, she headed out the door and down to the mall.

She got into her car and drove it down the road. She didn’t notice that the highway was black and sticky with crude oil-tar, and that hundreds of thousands of shattered femurs, ribcages, and skulls of oil-war victims were embedded in the goo. Her car made a hideous crackling, popping sound as it crushed brainpains and pelvises under the wheels. But Amanda didn’t hear, she was too busy grooving out to Coldplay.

When she arrived at the mall, she made her way first to the big clothing department anchor store at one end. She didn’t notice the thousands of sallow, hollow-cheeked children mutely lining the walls as she hummed a cheery tune and flipped through the clothes on the rack. The children stared silently at her, their fingers raw and bloody from sewing thousands of buttons on the blouses Amanda was looking at. She didn’t seem phased by fact that buttons were made of human bones streaked with gore, or that the blouses themselves had the unpleasant, leathery texture of tanned human skin. She picked a few and headed up to the counter, ignoring the tents and cardboard boxes in the isles. Inside them were the ghosts of homeless American textile workers, who had lost everything when their livelihoods had been transferred to slave child laborers in ruined, miserable nations.

The next stop was the electronics store, for the men in her life. She picked up a few trendy gadgets. The salesperson was very helpful, despite the fact that his head was at at right-angles to his neck. He had jumped from the roof of a Chinese electronics company in a suicide, and now his face was a purple bruised nightmare and his fractured limbs flapped like limp tentacles. But Amanda was too entranced with her eCrap to notice.

It was almost lunchtime, so Amanda headed over to the food court for a heaping plate of genetically modified Chicken niblets formed from the pressed, molded corpses of birds that had lived their whole lives buried up to their necks in their own excrement with high-fructose slurry being blasted into their stomachs via Lucite food-tubes. A side-dish of Fukushima sushi seasoned with heaping helpings of strontium and cobalt made a refreshing snack, and the whole meal was washed down with a sugary drink full of neurotoxins.

Afterwards it was time to hit the ATM and pick up more cash. Amanda didn’t know how these things worked and didn’t care. She didn’t see the complex mechanisms inside the ATM, the hard gears and cold steel knives which were directed by a mathematically-modeled robot towards the hearts of elderly pensioners and displaced workers strapped into an underground dungeon, gutting and eviscerating them with neat efficiency, scooping the cash out from the pockets of their steaming corpses, selling the bodies for extra profits, and funneling most of it into the accounts of obscenely wealthy, bloated plutocrats far away. As the money was swept along hidden tunnels and conduits, the machinery let a few flakes fall off onto a rusty conveyor belt to be delivered to Amanda. She only saw the final result, the bills that came out the little door at one end of this crazy, hidden contraption.

Before calling it a day, Amanda decided to catch a movie at the mall’s theatre. She sat down and didn’t notice the electrodes that extended silently from the screen and affixed themselves to her forehead, fluttering like quiet moths. She didn’t realize that the soothing electronic pulses washing through her head were wiping her brain as clean and smooth as the inside of a conch-shell, preventing any complex thoughts from bubbling up. Thourouhly sedated and nearly drooling, Amanda headed back home. What a great day it had been!