The Storage Space would have yawned, rattling each of its individual storage units, if only a building could yawn. Really it was just too tiresome. Here was yet another twenty-something girl with as much grace as a wild boar, clanging those horrid metal walls they’d installed all over the place when the poor, long-suffering Storage Space had become a storage space. Going on and on about what the utterly inarticulate thing could only refer to as her “stuff” and how she couldn’t possibly leave it in a storage unit. Snibbling on the shoulder of the scrawny youth next to her who held a box neatly labeled…you guessed it…”stuff.” The poor Storage Space was utterly overcome by the excruciating tedium of it all. Really it was too, too much! How on earth was a truly ancient old building supposed to get its sleep?
To sleep. To dream. Dream of a time when all the young people didn’t look so damn…generic. These two? The idiot youth with a countenance as well animated as a mannequin’s? Snibbler Girl, glued to his shoulder? Their clothes… Could be from any decade whatsoever in either the 20th or the 21st centuries. Any decade at all when boring people who didn’t know any better wore such “stuff.” Previously those who did know better would have held such people in the utter contempt they deserved. But now, deep into the 21st Century, people who knew better no longer existed, and everybody looked like this.
The Storage Space hadn’t always been a storage space. Oh, no. When first built…at a time when ladies in long, elegant gowns promenaded down Brooklyn’s wide walkways…the Storage Space had been Brooklyn’s grandest old theatre. People knew how to dress then! Not just the audience but most especially those precious darlings on the Storage Space’s grand old, mahogany stage. But there was something about that time, something left over. Never mind. The Storage Space wouldn’t think about it.
The Snibbler was banging those horrid metal walls again, this time with her fists. Wearily, having little choice, the Storage Space listened in…
“Couldn’t we try a little longer? I promise not to be so needy this time,” whined the Snibbler.
Oh, no, it couldn’t be, thought the Storage Space. That sexless mannequin had been…her lover?
“It’s for the best, Jennifer,” said the Mannequin.
