drift through half-haphazard rows of compact discs in their slender cases bedecked with stickers, pictures, anything to grab the wandering eye. at the front of the store a man with long hair and reflective sunglasses stares over the heads of his customers at the back wall, a keyboard in front of him. on his backpack a patch reads: 100% Hemp.

on the right side of the door is a small table with three older cd players bolted to it. they are several years old, and if you press on the top of each, it will bend into the unit. a teenage boy, his neck stretched above a thickening body, looks over his shoulder as he listens. perhaps he is paranoid; although this is not a paranoid place. it's in south prozakhistan, a hell of a location if you can handle the psychotic marijuana they smoke: twenty-foot trees of dark-green-purple buds that stick to your hand, and then space you into another world.

From the poster rack, one can look straight across the store and still pick out the words quite clearly, in square and faded red ink printed on stiff but curling cardboard: KEEP CHRISTIANS OUT OF METAL. magazines edges stand against the blunt ugliness of shelving. red signs with jagged cutout letters oversee the rows: jazz, metal, rock out daily.

PULL: slurs a door.

A woman sits on the bench in front, reading a newspaper and mumbling with suffocated anger. Finally, she balls the newspaper up and heaves it at a trashcan; it falls, and as if automaton, rolls to your feet. The band of exaggered contrast at the top of it reveals from its recursion as a clue to its existence the lone word thrash.

Sometimes you find yourself to be angry, and sometimes you find yourself to be leaden, vaguely reflective but molten and cold against the wood of a doorframe.

In the back of the store, in a faded wooden cradle etched with a morass of phone numbers, rests a payphone.