Featured Blog Post

Malled In by Jes Battis

“When I go to the mall, I usually want to leave right away. When I go to the mall, I feel like I’m on the tip of becoming myself.” —Kate Black, Big Mall: Shopping For Meaning It’s the eighties and I’m hunting a mechanical snail through Cottonwood Mall in Chilliwack. I saw the wind-up snail in Toys & Wheels, a store that contains almost everything I’ve ever wanted. The sorceress from He-Man stares wisely down at me from her cardboard package, wings tucked in. A series of niche toys with holographic chest plates—called Visionaries—offer a future of strange light and interminable wars. I’m newly eight, and I know my way from Dee Jay’s, where my mom works, to the paradise of action-figures on the other side of the mall. I walk in a secret pattern on the tiles, because if I don’t, Skeletor wins.  Though I secretly want him to.