Well Bottom Blues

September’s Prompt from Field Generator:Write a one-page monologue generated from a single found line (spoken by a character on a TV show, an influencer, a minister, a child, something overheard at a restaurant, waiting in line at the post office, etc.). Begin the monologue with that sentence, then follow your personal inclinations and poetic imagination to end up somewhere totally unexpected, finishing your piece at the scene of a false shared memory.

“The turkey don’t get no respect,” he said to the woman who remarked on the Christmas lights going up on Canal Street in early November. He remembered when that street was lined with department stores before they fled to the enclosed, air conditioned suburbs; the places his parents weren’t allowed to shop, the commercial celebration that revolved around the Mr. Bingle window display at Maison Blanche store, that strange snowman character with the waffle cone hat who exhorted children in a televised puppet play on television every afternoon to forget Santa and make sure Mom and Dad knew exactly what to buy and where for Christmas presents.

We both remember standing at that store-front window tableau of fake snow, the Mr. Bingle jingle out of tinny speakers, mothers in their best Mrs. Kennedy skirt suit, hat and gloves, the pair of us divided only by plate glass from the consumer Christmas miracle of Mr Bingle, unaware at seven of the other equally invisible divides between ourselves: the colors of our skin, the near miracle of he and his mother daring to stand on Canal Street in 1965, that only one of us would get the silly plastic extravagance of Rock’em Sock’em Robots.