Viewing blog post - Mad Utopia

He was a middle schooler, so what, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old? He lingered near the reprint machine next to the photo counter at my local pharmacy. The middle school is just a half mile or so down the road, so there are other middle schoolers about as well. I figure school must have let out no more than a half an hour ago. The other kids wander around, telling adolescent jokes, selecting candy, fingering merchandise they have no intention of buying. The store manager watches them with wary eye while they blithely ignore his scrutiny; horsing around and talking to their friends. But no one talks to this young man. He stands alone, meekly moving aside anytime someone approaches the reprint machine.

The photo clerk must have noticed me eye the boy. She shakes her head and says under her breath, just loud enough for me to hear, “Poor kid.”

I look at her, quizzically.

“His mom forgot to pick him up,” she whispers.

I glance back at the kid, who is desperately trying to look inconspicuous.

“It's happened before,” the clerk tells me. “We just let him hang out until she comes to get him.”

My God, I think, how can a mother forget to pick up her child? Be delayed, sure. But forget!

And the seed is sown. I used this sad incident as the crux of another Max Mann story, my seventh. I don't know yet if it will end up as a novella or a novel, but the incident in the pharmacy is central to the plot. All based on that one question: How could a mother forget to pick up her child?