the employee at the electronics desk is blonde and wears dorky metal-frame glasses. eleanor wonders if he feels good about himself. this is a game eleanor plays often, estimating the happiness of strangers based on only their appearance. eleanor thinks the employee is probably not very happy. a woman with a small child at her legs talking eagerly about super smash brothers approaches the employee. eleanor walks aimlessly through the electronics and music section. eleanor feels 'incredibly depressed' and puts her hands in her pockets.
eleanor comes to a deserted aisle with keyboards and cell-phone accessories. there is a keyboard on display for anyone to play. eleanor plays three notes over and over and tries to make something beautiful. nothing beautiful comes out of the keyboard.
eleanor walks over to a small display of casiotone keyboards. they are on sale and eleanor picks one up. a casiotone seems like something i should want to buy, eleanor thinks. she brings it to the electronics desk and waits for a large couple in matching baggy jeans to buy a point-and-shoot camera. the employee with the glasses takes the casiotone box in his hands. he rings it up. eleanor thinks of the small patches of grass in between highway lanes. she wants to have a picnic on one someday, she decides. eleanor then realizes she doesn't know anyone who would want to have a picnic on a highway with her.
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eleanor reads the wikipedia article on casiotone. wikipedia asks "did you mean, 'casiotone for the painfully alone'?" and eleanor says no, wikipedia, but thank you. it is important to thank the internet sometimes, eleanor thinks. eleanor gets very bored with the tiny wikipedia article and decides to vandalize it. she does this in a very small way, because she does everything in a very small way. she changes the sentence "casiotone keyboards come in three distinct families, seperated by method of synthesis," so that it claims there are only two families of casiotone. she feels like this wikipedia article is 'fucking pretentious' and closes the window.
eleanor runs her hand over the new keyboard. it feels very smooth, smoother than a new acoustic guitar. she plays the highest note and nothing comes out. she plays the lowest note and nothing comes out of the keyboard.
oh, it's broken, eleanor thinks in a very neutral way. she puts her hand on her face very briefly. eleanor hears rustling outside, and turns around to look out the window of her apartment.
outside of the window there are more birds than eleanor can count. she smiles very hard, grabs the broken casiotone, and walks out the door, to the street outside, toward what she thinks is the way to the ocean, if she can remember it right.
