Day 11
April 13, 2016
The Special K Urchin Letter – K
KORVETTES
The wind howled its Winter song, like an eerie Christmas carol, whipping around the scurrying shoppers, who hurried inside the crowded store.
The Christmas shopping season was in full bloom, back when it lasted perhaps a month, beginning after Thanksgiving, at the very earliest. It was the norm for Mr. and Mrs. K to go to their favorite department store, Korvettes. Being a Discount Store, the bargains were exceptional.
The store was a throbbing mass of people, shuffling around displays, and crowding the aisles. Mr. and Mrs. K ushered their daughter into the record department, Special K’s favorite stop on the shopping tour. Record albums were neatly stacked in order of genre and alphabetically.
Special K Urchin reckoned she could stay forever there. Though there was no way to listen to the songs, just browse through the various piles.
“We’ll be back soon,” Mrs. K assured her daughter. “We’re going to pick up some items.” Special K Urchin nodded, not really paying attention. The album covers were always a treat, and searching for that particular song in its long playing home, versus the singlular sensation it was occupied her fully.
Time has a way of passing quickly, so it’s said, when there’s fun to be had. Special K Urchin did not really noticed what time it was when Ma and Pa Kettle trod off to do the errands. Special K Urchin wasn’t the little girl who needed to be minded. She was teetering on her teens, and was a big enough girl to occupy herself well enough at times like this. Yet, something began niggling at her. Where were her parental units? Why had they not returned.
It was very likely that a memory of being taken up the Avenue by Grandma on Mother’s side, many years prior, and suddenly finding herself alone in a riot of shoppers at Woolworths, which lingered in the dark recesses of her mind. Grandma was gone, nowhere to be found. Special K urchin walked, and called out, but she could not find her.
The streets outside were filled with strangers passing by, and Special K Urchin looked to the right, and looked to the left, but she did not recognize her Grandma on Mother’s side in anyone. Still calling out for her, she headed off to her left.
After many, many steps, she saw a big horse, standing on the corner of the block. Atop this majestic animal was a man in blue. Special K Urchin looked up at him, and when she saw that he looked down at her, she cried out, tears running down her cheeks, “Can you help me find my Grandma?” And he did.
Standing in Korvettes, Special K Urchin, thought about seeking out the man in blue. Somewhere there must be another, and he would help her to find Ma and Pa Kettle. Just as she was leaving the record department, out of the crowd, seemingly like two mirages in the mist, Ma and Pa Kettle appeared. Right away, Ma Kettle recognized the look of utter distress on her daughter’s face.
Whatever it had been that they were doing out there in the rest of the store, they had returned. But it left Special K Urchin with a sense of abandonment.
Several years later, Special K Urchin, a young teeny-bopper had become rather rebellious. Perhaps it was in those moments back in Korvettes that she had developed her notion that the parents were the enemy. That they might turn on her at any moment. She even went as far as sharing her ideas with friends.
This new version of Special K Urchin had left Ma and Pa Kettle with the disturbing thought that perhaps during that fateful day in Korvettes, a switch had been made, and an identical phsyical twin, had been left in their precious Special K Urchin’s place.
It was a story that was passed around to friends and relatives, when all were older and fond of remembering the things of yester year. But Special K Urchin always held that Korvettes might well have been one of those rips in the fabric of space and time where she had slipped through into an alternate universe, and lived out the days of another self.
Quantum Hermit 