You Could Stay Here Forever

This is a story about the last night of a closed mall before it is demolished. You sneak in, hoping to find memories. It’s well done, with the sound manipulated at a critical point.

I haven’t visited a mall in ages but I am sad to read of ones I liked closing down. I remember thinking when I grew up I would go to one of those big malls and eventually buy one item from each store, except maybe the jewelry and such. But when I grew up I generally had favorite bargain outlets or waited for the day after Thanksgiving or Christmas to pick up sales.

Adults would moan how malls got rid of forests or parks or whatever when I was young, and these days I'm sort of mourning the loss of malls and food courts and such, even though I never spent much there and appreciate when bike paths or nature areas are set aside. Malls seem so impractical, but of course we can't drown in those memories.

YCSHF captures that and in a different way from Jim Aikin’s super-long The Only Possible Prom Dress, which also takes place after-hours in a mall, but it celebrates the oddities of malls with all sorts of odd stores with jokes. Here the limited word count here leaves plenty of mystery and reminds me of how malls got smaller, or they started having empty storefronts. And yet I'd still love to explore more of this abandoned mall. Both works got me to thinking of franchises I saw in all sorts of malls and went bankrupt. I finally Googled a few of them.