Special Offer
Flash-fiction - by Timothy Mudie
The bag of cheese puffs battered our screen door like an aggressive moth, its mechanized wings whirring, tiny speakers blaring a familiar jingle.
“Daddy, cheese puffs!” Alyssa squealed.
“It’s not even noon,” I said, both to her and the cheese puffs. “And she’s three. Get out of here.”
Corporations weren’t supposed to market junk food to kids Alyssa’s age—one of the vanishingly small number of advertising rules still extant—and pointing it out sometimes gained us a brief reprieve. Not today, apparently.
“This special cheese puff offer is for our valued customer Damien Cooper,” the cheese puffs announced. Skirting restrictions by claiming they were targeting me. To be fair, I had bought this brand of cheese puffs before.
I considered closing the window, but it was hot and if I ignored the incessant jingle for a couple minutes, it would leave. Of course, more would stop by over the course of the day—snacks, sodas, popular toys that would scream to Alyssa that she simply needed to have them. I dreaded the calliope music of the twice-daily ice cream drone.
“Come on,” I said, picking up Alyssa and balancing her on my hip. “Let’s go read a book.”
In her bedroom, I closed the curtains while she pulled her kidz-reader from her shelf and tabbed to her current favorite book, a tie-in to her current favorite cartoon.
“For more Sloth Power Points, watch the following special offer!” the book blared, its touchscreen already resolving into a garishly tie-dyed toy commercial.
I moved to skip it.
“Daddy!” Alyssa cried. “We need Sloth Power Points!”
For what? I wanted to ask. Earning more points so she could unlock opportunities to earn more points or get special offers for new products that didn’t actually offer anything special.
My phone vibrated in my pocket, and I removed it, thumbing on the screen. A discount if we bundled two of our existing streaming services with a third. It would probably be worth it…
Something hit the window, startling me. When I was Alyssa’s age, it probably would have been a bird. I drew back the curtain to see the face of an infuriatingly popular news anchor imploring me to watch his show that evening. If I tuned in for the first fifteen minutes, I’d earn bonus entertainment points, allowing me to skip two advertisement blocks on the program of my choice. He rattled off the list of exceptions so quickly that I couldn’t follow, but it was clear were a lot of them. I let the curtain fall back in front of the window and checked my phone.
I stopped. Looked from my phone to Alyssa, eyes glued to the ad playing on her kidz-reader. I gently removed it from her hands, turned it off, and put it back on the shelf. My phone went next to it.
Together, we went to the basement, where I finally managed to dig out a few largely-deteriorated picture books that had somehow survived from my childhood.
“Let’s go somewhere special,” I said.
“Playground?” Alyssa asked, excited.
I thought about the playground with its swarming snacks and ad-drones, every slide and swing plastered with the face of some cartoon character or pop star. “Even better,” I said.
I strapped Alyssa in her car seat and started the car. Instantly, the radio blared a commercial for an oil change service, a special offer if I kept the ad on repeat until I reached the auto-shop. Gritting my teeth, I pressed the button to turn off the radio, only to be informed that I’d already used my ad-free minutes for the month. I turned the volume as low as it would let me and drove.
We reached the playground, parked the car, walked past the playground and to a trailhead, barely used these days. No one passed us as we walked into the woods. It felt like we were truly alone.
Buzzing sounded overhead and I knew before looking what I would see.
“Don’t forget to stay hydrated,” called a hovering sports drink bottle. “Try new Starfruit Splash… half off for a limited time!”
Was the drink waiting in the trees for unsuspecting hikers? Was there nowhere we could go to get away from the incessant marketing? Just for a minute? And then, a half-remembered vacation with my parents, when I’d been barely older than Alyssa. They claimed I whined about not having a TV in our cabin.
I took Alyssa’s hand and led her back to the car. We drove for a long time, singing over the advertisements and playing word games and listing our favorite colors. We drove until the radio began to sputter and crackle with static.
We parked in a dirt pull-off marked by a small wooden sign. No other cars were parked, and no drones hovered within view. Nothing appeared when we entered the forest and continued up a gentle incline, Alyssa alternately walking by my side and riding my shoulders. We stopped by a large tree that was growing partially through a boulder. Alyssa could scarcely believe such a thing was possible.
I listened, but the only buzzing I heard was cicadas, the only calls from sparrows.
We sat with our backs to the tree trunk, Alyssa cross-legged and leaning her head on my upper arm. We read dogeared copies of Dr. Seuss and the Berenstain Bears and Curious George, most of them more than once.
When we’d read the books enough times, we roamed near the boulder, flipping smaller rocks to look for bugs. No drones found us, no special offers or bonus points. Nothing but me and Alyssa. We picked up gnarled sticks and imagined all the infinite things they could be.
END