Prince Prance had a favorite store, Eye Collector. A small, overstuffed closet of a storefront, packed with every object, color and sound imagined and forgotten.
Passing jeweled lamp, swatch watch, alien radio, and handheld mirror Prance pushed his way into the racks of musty clothing so deep as to find worlds and wombs among the folds of sprawling dresses, hats and mats. Whole families tucked into the pocket of a giant’s pantsuit or an ogres overalls, sheltering siblings who had not seen the sun their entire life, feasting on crumbs pulled from suitcases some 4000 years old, made of stretched neanderthal skin on bone frame. Blankets and bedsheets that released smells ancient, foreign and impenetrable blocked certain stringing paths. Books covered with markings and patterns that had lost all meaning to any living thing collapsed into themselves, a thriving compost of dead language.
Tunneling into a pile of action figures, (He-man, Thundercats, Micronauts, Musclemen) Prance found a skull encrusted door that opened to a huge lake-filled cavern packed with candles all unique. They glowed, flickered, licked and glared from faces of strange shaped flame.
An orchestra of musical instruments played themselves on an island in the flooded chamber’s center accompanied by a beat of drips on pots.
A man so ancient as to predate time sat in a rickety timber boat.
“Play me a song as pretty as that one,” he gestured to the instruments, “and I’ll grant you the secret of eternal life”
Prince Prance excavated himself from the troves and hurried home to his hovel, hidden among brambles behind a building quite forgotten in a part of town fell off the map.
He pulled out his casio and his cassette 4-track.
“I’ve got to record some good shit tonight!”
