Flash! Fiction 3 by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

12

The Outlet

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Just off the interstate between Detroit and Toledo, you might see—

if you look closely—a poorly marked exit to a modest-looking outlet.

It isn’t one of those sprawling villages of Nike, Gap, Liz Claiborne, Eddie Bauer, and Circuit City. It’s a simple flat-roof, concrete block cube signed "THE OUTLET."

I’ve driven this route dozens of times and never noticed this exit, which is squeezed in between two larger and busier exits. I would have missed it again except that I happened to remember a conversation I had last fall with a young journeyman machinist from Grand Rapids named Dieter Knecht. Dieter caught a ride with me near the state line, and he asked if I could take him as far south as I was going. He was a talkative fellow.

He talked about this place where he had worked for a few weeks to make some cash before getting back on the road. It didn't look like much from outside, he said, but inside it was incredibly different and just incredible.

He described broad, well-lit corridors lined with storefronts, offices, and mysterious doors and connected by escalators and elevators to other levels and more corridors. There was no map of the facility, he said, but a custodian at the entrance would direct you wherever you wanted to go, and when you were done, you could tell him that you wanted to try something else.

Dieter claimed that it was impossible to exhaust all of the opportunities. But at some point you had to decide to stick with something for a while, he said, not so much because you found what you were looking for as that you suddenly craved something familiar.