Free The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

some intrepid marketer got the idea that the word ‘mall’ was a negative, so beginning with the shopping malls close to the downtown Boston area and radiating outward, the chain malls had been getting makeovers and new names.
    In all fairness, the makeovers were sometimes quite impressive, in that they turned low-end strip malls into upscale centers with a higher quality of stores. The rebranding was a pretty effective way of signaling that change. Still, when it turned the Oakdale Mall into The Oakdale Experience , pretty much everyone laughed. Annie didn’t know one person who called it that without irony. Even tourists weren’t quite sure what to think.
    Whoever was in charge of redesigning the mall did a fantastic job, though. What had been a large rectangular building surrounded by parking was turned into a rectangular parking area surrounded by shops, with a smaller rectangle of shops in the middle. From the air, it looked like an especially thick digital zero. This seemed like a catastrophic choice for a New England shopping center—who would shop at an outdoor plaza in the winter? —but it worked surprisingly well. The restaurants, movie theater and bowling alley made it the kind of place people went to spend the day rather than visit in order to shop, and that turned out to be an important distinction.
    Annie didn’t have a lot of spending money at any given time, but she enjoyed going to the mall when circumstances conspired in her favor. A generation or two ago “the mall” might have been a place for someone of her age and/or economic level to go and “hang out”, and perhaps use a skateboard and harass angry white adults like in the music videos from the 90’s. (These videos looked as dated to her as the black-and-white films she watched with her mother. In fairness, everything pre-spaceship looked a little dated anyway, but these looked like especially quaint artifacts. Especially the clothing.) For her, hanging out at the mall, more often than not, meant figuring out who’d gotten a job where. It was basically the only place in the area that hired high-school-age kids on a consistent basis.
    The Oakdale Mall (everyone still called it this) also benefited greatly from being the only shopping center of consequence within a twenty-mile radius of the spaceship. Sure, there were the authentic and semi-authentic shops on Main Street, but almost without exception those shops ended up being places to stop at briefly, and not to linger. Plus, one of the things that made Main so very authentic was a thorough lack of parking.
    The typical activities arc of the Sorrow Falls tourist was, in order: see the spaceship; discover the ship was not all that interesting a thing to look at; visit Main; if lucky, find parking; shop for approximately forty minutes; hear something about ‘The Oakdale Experience’ and conclude incorrectly that it was perhaps—with a name like that—an amusement park; head to the mall; spend remainder of vacation there.
    One would think the town of Sorrow Falls would be interested in encouraging people to stay, perhaps by building a mall of their own, but after three years the town’s attitude toward visitors was permanently affixed somewhere between blandly courteous and get the hell off my lawn . Just about any local, when asked, would tell a visitor, “You should really check out Oakdale!” and not think twice about it. They would even offer directions.
    It was one of the only places Annie visited outside of Sorrow Falls on any kind of consistent basis. It was too far to bike, though, so she had to rely on people with cars. This was also one of the reasons she didn’t have a job there, although not the only one. She also didn’t want to be too far from the ship, for more or less the same reason Mr. Shoeman and the rest of the rooftop city people couldn’t bring themselves to leave. She didn’t want to be the one who gave up waiting on something to happen right before something