You’re walking around the Stanford Shopping Center when you see a small store called Muji. Inside, to the right of the entrance, you see two mist machines on a table. They are small white cylinders and a white mist is rising from each. You can hear them gurgling. Next to them are two small black bottles that say Pure Essential Oil Happy and Pure Essential Oil Rosemary. You stand there in that white and placeless mist and you feel happy. You also feel rosemary. A lady behind you is tapping her foot, waiting for her turn at the mist machines. She is making you feel less rosemary.

You walk past suitcases and dishware, trash cans and clothing, and you stop at the art supply section and find a small black notebook and a mechanical pencil. You feel as if someone is watching you and you turn around and see a little boy staring at you over the rim of a black trash can. He has light brown hair and hazel eyes and that is all you see before he disappears into the trash can. You wait and his brown hair rises slowly over the rim and he watches as you go up to a woman working there. You ask her if the boy comes with the trash can and you point at the little boy but he ducks down too quickly. She follows you to the trash can and you both look down at a little boy in a blue Thomas the Tank Engine t-shirt and he growls and sticks his tongue out and then closes his eyes as if that might make you vanish.

Oh. No, sorry, the woman says, laughing, we don’t sell children here. Then she looks around the store for the little boy’s parents. Meanwhile he has gone silent as if hoping everyone might just go away and not exist. You go away and pay for your notebook and pencil and you turn and see him watching you. And you watch as a man comes by and gently lifts the little boy from his temporary home and holds him in the crook of his arm and carries him out of the store. You hope that was his father.

You stop again in the rosemary mist and think then of your own childhood. You remember old forts made, cardboard boxes inhabited and fortified, the darkness beneath sinks, a place to sit in happy solitude with your favorite hot wheels car. And there beneath the sink you heard all around you the rush of water in plumb darkness and through the fused wood adult voices spoke and they were beyond the perimeter of your world and meant nothing to you.