The place had a smell. It was always the same smell no matter what stock was on hand. They could get 500 Cuban cigars in and within hours the pungent odor of the tobacco and the lingering undertones of dirt would be subsumed by the store’s natural smell.
It had everything Mackie’s General Store, everything you could possibly want or need in that small town in that particular time. Old man Fred, no one was ever really sure about his last name except to say that it wasn’t Mackie, like to joke that if it wasn’t somewhere in those aisle you probably didn’t really need it and just thought you wanted it.
The store looked like something out of a Faulkner novel, high storage shelves with the rolling library ladder, down the sides. Narrow aisles though dark wood shelves and display cabinets. Make no mistake: it was a dry goods store. If you wanted hardware you had to cross the street and go down the block to Lloyd’s Hardware which had a smell of its own.
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