I walked home from school that day in a haze. Classes were uneventful, but the extent of the torment I had been enduring from everyone in school had finally just worn me down. I needed something to distract me from life. I made it down to Utopia Street before suddenly veering hard right, nearly toppling an elderly lady over, who visibly scowled at me as I shuffled past. As much as I wanted to shutter myself in my room, I needed to stop somewhere where I could get some comfort, some relief. I crossed the street and walked over to a rundown bodega in a strip mall.
VINCENTS WONDERS AND WARES
now selling asorted fruit
NO REfUNDS
Vincent was from Italy, he said with a robust “ITALIA” any time any question came up about his heritage. His paper thin mustache was always slimy, the result of his insistence of licking his lips between sentences. He seemed like he weighed 100 to 300 pounds, depending on his choice of Goodwill clothing he wore; he had haphazard style, a weakness for plaid, and long, slick black hair that spilled over his face when he was excitedly discussing the merits of a foreign egg beater with a new (and usually non repeat) customer.
I pushed open the cracked glass door, inhaling the stiff aroma of cheap cologne and musty book, some stench that was as captivating as it was horrifying. A newspaper rustled a few steps away, and Vincent peered over the Business section.
“MOLTOBENE!” This was Italian for “very good” although I was suspicious that he just thought my name was Molto Bene and had no earthly idea what Milton meant.
I gave Vincent an okay gesture with my hand, curling my pointer finger and thumb into a small little hole right in front of my good eye. He beamed, tossing the paper to the side and opening his arms out wide.
“Amico, what can Vincent do for you today?” He glanced around the shop, stacks of boxes and clutter awaiting on every table and bookshelf, price tags affixed haphazardly on each, most with multiple red slashes on the numbers.
I bobbed my head back and forth, looking for any new gadgets and gizmos that I might kill an afternoon with. Vincent raised a finger up and audibly made an “A-ha!” noise in his throat.
“You, you are a kid, you like comics, yes?”
I nodded.
“I wish I sold those.” He chortled, amused at what I assumed was a odd joke.
“Yeah, that would be neat. I would buy some once in a while.” Between my meager wages as a dishwasher at the local diner (The Diner, because the owner was a very blunt man) and the fact that I lived at home with my grandparents, who had no active income, that once in a while was more like once in a blue moon.
I brushed by the desk/register Vincent was sitting at, my eye caught by a black box with foreign lettering. Very foreign; it didn’t register as any script I had ever seen before in school. There was no price tag attached to the box, and the only indication of what was in the box was a tiny symbol in the upper right corner, a rectangle with another rectangle inside it, about the size of my thumbprint.
I picked the box up. For being around the size of my hand, it had some heft to it. Vincent had went back to his paper as I browsed, and he muttered something about “That idiota Reagan” between loud slurps of coffee. Vincent usually had a crate up front with assorted wares he had struggled selling, which was usually everything in the store, at some point. I assumed the black box was meant to go in there, so I brought it up to his desk, and reached for a banana as I got up there. I tried to hide my recoil when my hand touched the slimy rind of spoiled banana.
“Hey, is this supposed to be in the bargain bin?” I pushed the box over to him.
He cocked his head, left eye closed, investigating the box. He looked up at me, puzzled.
“This is not mine, Molto Bene.” He traced a finger over the lettering, then scratched his sideburns while contorting his face into a frown. “I would know if this was mine. It is not.”
I decided to be shrewd, in case he actually thought to look in the box and recognize it’s potential value.
“I’ll give you five bucks for it.” That was nearly two hours salary for me.
Vincent started to belly laugh. “MOLTO BENE! You want this box? You take this box. And here, you take this too!” Vincent set a second box on top of the first one as he grabbed my crinkled up Lincoln. This box was in plain, boring ol’ English.
Rubik’s Cube
The box had been opened before, and there were visible grease stains fingerprinted on the box. Vincent apparently had saw this, tried to play with it, and gave up on it. I always thought they were kinda neat, though, so I clutched the two boxes up and stuffed them into my backpack.
“Thank you sir.”
Vincent made a clicking sound with his tongue. “I am not sir, I am Vincent! Thank Vincent, not sir, sir!” He made another belly laugh, this time grabbing my hand and giving it a firm shake as he did so. I laughed with him, then turned and went to walk out the door. As I pushed the cracked glass door back open, I heard him say one more thing to me as I walked out.
“Remember Molto Bene, remember one thing.”
“No refunds.”
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