Trinkets of gold-like shine, silver strings beaded with breaks of rows in Morse-like patterns, paintings leaning back into walls while on top of shelves, their arch hiding even more plentiful valuables. The ground a carpet-like soft dirt, the shoes almost sinking into its velvet-like wine carpets. Even old mimics of miniature train mockery on tiny railroads, where the replicas are resting before a path blocked with metal cups of old filled with pearl necklaces and marbles. Pocket size with red coats, the toy soldiers stand at the ends of the table; these little nutcrackers are almost guarding the mounds.
Underneath the warm and soft hue of light neither too bright nor quiet, a woman enters the door, pushing it open into the crowded entrance, slowing with consideration of the tight entrance. With the door now opened, she is welcomed by the mannequin who’s dressed in the sapphire hat adorned in cloud white and flamingo-hued pink feathers, its category of wear not clear. The smell inside here introduces the mixed drink, its whiff brewing of library, an old dry lacquer, and the hinting scent of coins like treasure; it boozes her nerves calm. The woman almost has to slide in from all the goods surrounding tall and wide, between the large array of undefined miniatures, the ones almost equal in size to herself, and the gargantuan. She continues into the turns of the store’s maze, almost unable to think or comprehend all the many things. She is carried away deeper into the shop, guided by an intuition below, waiting for something to catch her eyes.
Eventually she finds her place, with a surprising cause. Her attention is drawn towards it all, the antique dolls painted with thin legs and long horn shoes, smiling away. They sit in columns and rows over the old piano in one corner. She finds herself more than interested… Something here matters to her more than can be contained, but she does not know how to describe how special this spot feels. Right then and there, she notices, above the tiny toys of boys and girls, there it is: a painting… “Wow…” She grins with a flutter of her infatuation climbing out her voice. The art she adores sits above the window. The glass ticks away in contrast, where the rain pours with melancholy outside it, showing a blue from the outside against the warmth and joy she has discovered inside. It isn’t just the air that is warm; the lights just fuzz with a pleasant sun rose of tender.
The woman notices how striking the painting is… Still looking at it. She cannot describe how it affects her deeply. The painting: Is it a joker? No… A clown? A jester maybe? That’s it, a jester. The face of the one shown is white with an uncrinkled hat hanging, and he is adorned in black and white contrasts winding around his arms, legs, and torso. His neck has petals of red curls as a neck collar, and the two yellow buttons he wears below it are meant to shine from a source unknown, indicated from white strokes of paint.
The slight and scraggly Jester is sitting on top of the old tree, a light brown, a kind of dry. The tree looks almost arcane as he is, but mythical too. Is it the age of it? Maybe the way the bark runs in thick rounds like copper wires twisted? The bark is textured like thick roots somewhat. The Jester sits on the toughest branch, and the branch looks restful, like a man’s lap and arms. The tree almost feels designated to him by God.
Behind the tree, there is an endless field of green with a path cutting through it, like the slithering movement of a large snake gone North. What is most peculiar? The contrast of that most pure black above it all: it makes itself less like a sky, and its impression is that this is a world floating somewhere alien. Second most odd is that long nose of his; it kinda droops out thin, but for what purpose was he painted with such a feature?
She hurries back and through, looking as to where the shop’s counter should be. Shouldn’t the place of purchase be easier to find? She thinks this for a moment, before realizing, “I don’t care.” She declares this with entertainment, excited to find who to talk to about what she wants. Over the train and the cups stuffed with pearl necklaces and marbles, she sees an old man afar, with white hair receding in an almost fluffy elder jovial of look, where his glasses almost slide off the end of his nose. He looks very entrenched in a book of some kind. She walks towards the old man of equal height to the woman, wearing his coffee cream color of vest over the top of his white button-up, possibly stained with coffee at the cusp of the sleeve’s end.
“Hey, sir?” the woman motions out.
“Why yes?” The old man’s eyes look over the top of his glasses, his head unmoving.
She answers, “I would like to know about the painting above the dolls, the one with the green field and Jester on a tree?”
There isn’t much of a struggle for him to remember the one thing amongst the many. He replies, “Why yes, of course, what of it? I assume you would like to make a purchase?”
She feels welcomed to say, “Yes, actually, I was captured by it the moment it found me.”
He smiles with a grinning squint at the eyes. “How honest! Why, of course!” He says this a smidgen more loudly than a librarian, though it is a modest loudness that reserves its pleasure.
He continues, “Now, there is one thing I remember about that one. Let’s see…” He rubs some of the swabs of his large fingers through the thin yet fluffy white hair receded. “Ah, yeah! The thing is… about that one, is that—it is actually new, but that was an unfortunate circumstance in how I acquired that one.” He looks contemplative, and his fingers still curl through his hair, now more like a well-relaxed monkey, though not without his emotion of consideration now hinting in the soft old squench in his mouth, nose, and white eyebrows.
“Uhh… Sorry, what is your name again?” the old man questions of her.
“Oh, yeah, my name is Sarah. What about your name, sir?”
“Yeah, my name is Louis! Nice meeting you, Sarah.” He smiles sincerely, and Sarah smiles back. Eventually he is thinking again. “Oh… where was I?”
“You were talking about how you got the newer painting I really liked,” Sarah reminds him.
“Yeah! Okay.” He grins slightly again, before the consideration slightly squeezes his mouth, nose, and eyebrows in an ascending order. “I was talking about how I got that. The girl who painted that recently passed away; it was only because she recently sold almost all of her paintings before passing, and it makes me wonder.” He rolls his lips in now, his eyeballs rolling up towards his left in thought, his eyebrows and nose still squenched the same, and he tells her, “Now I do think that she genuinely wanted a place to sell them for others to see her art, and I do think her art is genuinely grand.” One last gesture; he looks down, his face loosening a degree more when he motions one end of his mouth in and up a bit, with a soft look down. “I can’t really tell, though. It saddens me, and I enjoyed talking to her. Just thought I would let you know. That’s what I thought you should know.” He finishes saying.
She is speechless for a moment, before wondering out loud, “I wonder what could of happened to her?”
“I don’t know,” Louis says firmly in his politeness.
Further silence. She tries to fill the air, “Well, how did you get a shop like this? I really like everything you got here.”
He waves his hand out somewhat, having heard it many times. “Well, you know, I had a bad habit of keeping too many things, so I learned to share my stuff here with some money to justify it.” He smiles a bit by the end of the sentence.
“Mhm. I mean, I don’t think you need a justification, sir,” Sarah says.
“Yeah, maybe. Eh.” Louis kinda finds himself lost for conversation. “Have fun looking around, lemme know what ya would like to buy, just lemme know.” He grins slightly before his eyes dig back down into the words of his book seen on his rich varnish-brown counter.
She goes back, finding the painting. It feels different now, and she feels a blend of feelings. She still adores it, but also finds sad melancholy mixed with the wonder. The wall of the window between the blue and rain outside unifies into the warm and wondrous inside, a particular kind of state to be in. Still yet, she reaches up and grabs it, but she has forgotten to ask Louis about the price of the picture. She thinks she can find the price on the back. And what would you know, a modest bit of office tape holds a thin bit of tag on the back, and it reads out the price of twenty dollars. She thinks for a moment out loud in quiet, “Ohh… That’s not bad at all.” Then a moment of silence. She sees that the back corner of the frame has the artist’s name: “By Alice Love.” The name has her whispering to herself again. “I mean, it should be worth more than hundreds of dollars at least, but surely Louis doesn’t mean any wrong by it; he said he likes the painting.”
She feels a warmth for a moment, looking down at the Jester, a kind of flush slewing slowly, both good and bad, but the care heads all her emotions into her decision. As she holds the painting in her hand, careful to keep her fingers only on the frame, another object finds her, a VHS tape. Something around her tells her to get it, and the simple curiosity is intuitive. She grabs it, looking for a price tag, but nothing. “Hmm…” She thinks about it. “I’ll just ask Louis.”
As she is about to walk away from that corner of the shop, she sees something else, two dolls across the piano, but now sitting in front of a small red house, both with button eyes and yarn for hair. These slight ones are from stitched fiber, and one is red-haired while the other has black hair. The two button—eyed ones speak to her almost, these two miniature androgynous toys, but she walks past them. She now knows her way through the maze a bit more, and she journeys back to the shop’s register and counter.
“Sir? I think I know what I would like to buy,” she says while placing the two items on the counter before him, about enough comfortable distance away from his book he is reading. The two items are the painting of the tree and its Jester, and the VHS tape.
“Why yes, we can do that.” His eyes look up and away from his book while saying, “Oh, I don’t remember that one.” He grabs the boxy-shaped VHS tape. “I don’t really see a price tag on this one. Where did you find it, young lady?” Louis asks.
“Uhm… I found it on top of the piano in the corner, like, below the painting and near the dolls,” she says in a bit of worry, the corner of her lip being rolled in a bit, trying to reach the soothing grip of teeth.
“I see. Well, I am not sure why that is there.” Louis looks at it, not really doing much gesturing this time. “Okay, how about this: you have this other thing you wanted for free, because I don’t remember it and forgot the tag. Say you?”
“Wow, yeah, we can do that,” she says with a moderate norm of grin.
She reaches into her purse, finding the leather wallet. “Here, sir.”
“Yes.” He thumbs through the one ten, a five, and five ones; fast enough. “Yup. You’re all good to go,” he says casually, punching open the old register.
“Thank you, sir. Have a good day,” she says while walking away towards the door.
He lazily gestures with a calm voice, though not impolitely. “Yup, you too.”
Sarah pulls back the door, seeing the rain still going, and she thinks for a moment, “What about my painting? The tape? I can’t get it wet.” She looks down for a moment underneath the frame of the open door, neither outside nor inside. “Oh yes, I can just hold them in my jacket on the way to the car.” She steps out into the blue, leaving the warmth, and puddles splash as she walks fast around the sidewalks of the calm city block.