After about twenty minutes (five hundred years to James) of patiently letting himself be dragged along as his mother pored over different tints of wood stain, he had spotted an area with furniture for sale. He plotted his escape route, and waited for the optimum moment to make his break for it, which came in the form of a young man with overly bleached teeth, clad in a funny-looking orange apron, talking to his mother and gesturing towards the shelves which seemed to stretch endlessly on. As her back was turned, James decided it wouldn't be a bad idea to sit down and rest for a while. Just until his mother stopped talking about stuff so much.
It didn't take him long to find the biggest, fattest chair in the room. As he flung himself into the arms and plopped down gratefully on the buttery leather, letting out a loud, dramatic sigh, he noticed just a few inches short of his fingertips a small array of buttons and arrows. A control panel, like a space ship. Timidly, he stretched one arm out and pushed a button. With a quick mechanical whir, the back of the chair had risen for a couple inches. Delighted, James let his fingers dance across the panel, manipulating the chair-ship, to rise, fall, lean forwards, back, up again, to the left, footrest in, out, in, incline the back, raise the seat... James was having so much fun, he didn't notice his mother being led away to view the impressive new shipment of crystal light fixtures. He was concentrated on a man in a long black coat about ten yards in front of him, closely examining a shelf. James locked his space gun on the alien, raaaaaaaaaaaaaised the gun to the target, took aim...
BANG!
Aleksandr jumped, whipping around to find the source of the startling noise. An older man in an orange Home Depot uniform grumbled as he bent to recover the heavy box that had just toppled off the cart he'd been pushing.
Exhaling, Aleksandr turned back distractedly to the shelf which had previously been occupying his attention. He picked up a small can of paint, turned it over in his damp palm, scanned the chemicals. Set it down, took up another, read. Ethyl acetate, formaldehyde, iron oxide. Nitroglycerin, nitric acid, parafin. In other words, the perfect concoction for a moderately destructive paint bomb, when added to a little dry ice. Tonight, his anarchist group would create a dozen or so of these bombs and drop them on the police cars at the station. They would show the Machine what they were up against. A couple shattered windshields shouldn't mean too much to those ignorant war-fighting bastards next to their big guns and their depleted uranium fire. It was Aleksandr's duty to provide the paint, and as conforming to society's consumerism would be against his morals, he was planning on employing the old five finger discount.
Absorbed as he was in his rebellious thoughts, he almost missed the small, raven-haired boy in the blue shorts staring at him from a chair in the furniture-cluttered clearing. Aleksandr stopped what he was doing and turned. The boy, who had been staring at him absentmindedly while beating his skinny legs 1,2,1,2 against the protruding footrest, stopped what he was doing as well. Aleksandr saw innocence and humanity in the boy's eyes, his head slightly cocked in curiosity. Aleksandr looked down at the can of paint still in his calloused, long-fingered hand, looked back up at the boy. The boy's bright, rounded face broke into a smile. Aleksandr's cigarette-dried lips cracked as he smiled back.
Behind the boy, Aleksandr saw a middle-aged, harassed-looking woman striding purposefully towards the chair. She had been crying, and she was breathing heavily as she came around the back of the chair and grabbed the boy. Her eyes registered him looking their way, stooped and began to loudly scold the boy. He sat with her vice-like grip on his arm and his hands between his knees.
Aleksandr placed the paint can back on the metal shelf, walked out of the aisle, past the checkout counters and out the door. He decided he'd give his little brother a call when he got home.
The smile was broken as James felt a violent, and rather painful, tug on his arm. "I've been worried sick, James!" his mother breathed. "I've told you never to leave mummy's side when we're in a big place like this! Oh, what if someone had taken you?" She glared accusingly at the man looking at them for a second before returning her red-rimmed eyes to her son. "Get up, we're leaving. We're going to have a talk at home about listening."
As he was wrenched upwards on his feet and firmly marshaled away, he looked back at the strange, smiling man, who was walking to the exit empty-handed. I guess he didn't find the colour he wanted, James thought. He turned back around and followed his shaken mother to the parking lot, where he sat in the backseat and breathed in the hot, heavy, unpleasant air that only comes from a car sitting out in the sun for extended periods of time. By the time he got home, his mother had calmed down and he was allowed to catch his favorite t.v. program before bed.
He went to school the next day. And the next day. And the next.
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