In movies the counters at drug stores always featured two old men discussing local politics. In real-life, Mouth encountered hefty older women who could not speak English or teenagers with red faces.
          Red Face looked down at Mouth and would have scowled, but the slack in his jaw prevented any such drastic show of expression. Mouth put the universal remote and the $10 bill on the counter, and waited for his change.
          Red Face had a finger that twitched, and his eyes had odd pits in their corners, extra little folds of skin. Nothing so drastic as the great elephant-like wads of flesh that blocked Mouth’s vision, but they were a defect. Mouth looked for everyone else’s defects. It didn’t make him feel better, but he did it anyway.
          $1.47 was his change. Red Face with the Pitted Eyes thanked him, but Mouth had his deaf ear to him and didn’t hear.
          On the walk home he spotted a hobbler, a man with black things growing in and around his ears who had one eye that could not look straight, a woman whose shirt seemed to hang down on only one breast, a train of those pudgy faced people who only went around in groups with minders, and a boy with a brown patch of skin on his face that sprouted hair. Everyone was a little broken.
          But not too broken. Mouth believed he could speak if his jaw was not cemented shut with bone, and that he could sing if these same bones did not press down inside him and apply pressure to his trachea. Mouth was fairly secure in the idea that he was ok, but for his shattered face.
So if he was okay, despite his cephalic eccentricities, others were okay despite the terrors played upon them by nature or self.
          Life seemed to challenge the assertion at every turn.
          But Mouth was something of an optimist.
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