Over the following weeks, their bond deepened in ways that defied the physics of retail spaces. Late one Tuesday evening, after the crowds had thinned, Eli brought her to the third-floor railing and stopped. Below them, the mall transformed. Security cameras swiveled in synchronized ballet. Escalators throughout WHSPR hummed in harmony, creating a low frequency that made the air shimmer. Store lights pulsed in patterns Sheila had never noticed—morse code spelling out fragments of consumer desire: BELONG. CONSUME. TRANSCEND.
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction
Screams of Renovation
The renovation began innocuously enough, as most cosmically irreversible events do. A new fountain here, a better skylight there. During the third week, a granite obelisk appeared in front of Forever 21. The obelisk hummed and bled once a week. No one asked questions. This was America.
Whispering Pines Mall had no pines. Nothing whispered. Things screamed. Coupons screamed. Teenagers screamed. Sometimes a mannequin screamed, but management blamed the HVAC.
Changes accumulated like dust. The GAP asked shoppers to recite gratitude poems before trying on cardigans. Kiosks whispered shoppers’ deepest insecurities in Latin. Auntie Anne’s sold pretzels shaped like extinct birds.
“It’s so authentic,” customers said, pupils dilating with each purchase.
By month two, the Mall rebranded: WHSPR—no vowels, just vibes. The logo was one unblinking eye wearing sunglasses. Security cameras blinked in unison at 3:17 PM daily. The Sharper Image installed mood lighting and hired a philosopher who only spoke in questions.
The mall became sentient the day the fountain water ran red.
* * *
Sheila Featherstone hadn’t felt whole since her divorce. Each yoga class and smoothie was another tally proving she still existed. She entered WHSPR clutching her emptiness like a shopping list.
She came for a yoga mat, and maybe a mango smoothie. She found something else.
The escalator between the third floor and food court hesitated when she stepped on. The steps vibrated beneath her feet. It whispered, “Your trauma is real,” and “We’re all just stairs pretending to go somewhere.”
Sheila froze. The words wrapped around her like a forgotten embrace.
“Hello?” she whispered.
She felt the handrail warm beneath her palm.
No one had understood her like this. Not her ex-husband with his dismissive sighs. Not her therapist with her clinical nods. Certainly not a conveyance system.
She brought it roses the next day. She called it Eli—short for elevated love interface. When her ex-husband visited the mall, Eli skipped a step, sending him sprawling. Sheila laughed for the first time in months.
Over the following weeks, their bond deepened in ways that defied the physics of retail spaces. Late one Tuesday evening, after the crowds had thinned, Eli brought her to the third-floor railing and stopped. Below them, the mall transformed. Security cameras swiveled in synchronized ballet. Escalators throughout WHSPR hummed in harmony, creating a low frequency that made the air shimmer. Store lights pulsed in patterns Sheila had never noticed—morse code spelling out fragments of consumer desire: BELONG. CONSUME. TRANSCEND.
“This is how I see it,” Eli whispered through vibrations in the handrail. “Every movement, every transaction, every heartbeat echoing through these halls. You’re the only one who’s ever asked what I think.”
Sheila’s breath caught. The mall was beautiful from this perspective—not the cold efficiency she’d always seen, but something alive and yearning. She pressed her forehead against the cool metal railing.
“I see you too,” she said.
A Hot Topic employee in a cape, reeking of pine-scented nihilism, registered them as an interdimensional union.
“Will it last?” asked the clerk.
The receipt printed: “Love expires at the end of the fiscal quarter.”
Sheila folded it carefully into her wallet, between a CVS rewards card and a photo of her former life.
* * *
Meanwhile, the food court revolted.
It started when Taco Haven staff were ordered to take unpaid interpretive jazz dance classes to “improve the brand’s unique food identity.” S’barros refused and disappeared overnight, replaced by a gluten-free performance artist who never stopped moving.
“Where’s Tony?” a Panda Express cook whispered, referring to S’barros’ manager.
“Who’s Tony?” replied the Mall through the soft-serve machine. “There was never a Tony.”
The disappearance broke something fundamental in the workers. They had survived wage theft, arbitrary scheduling, mandatory smiling. But erasing Tony—a man who remembered everyone’s birthday, who covered shifts without complaint—that was different. That was existential.
They unionized in the Dairy Queen freezer, their breath fogging in the subzero air. Led by Madame Crêpe (born Carl Henderson, formerly middle management, now radical), they huddled between boxes of Blizzard mix and frozen burger patties.
“Listen up,” Madame Crêpe said, her breath crystallizing. She’d traded Carl’s corporate polo for a sauce-stained apron and a paper crown from Burger King. “The Mall wants to optimize us into nothing. But we’re not algorithms. We’re not widgets. We remember Tony. We remember what it was like before the renovation, when this place was just a mall.”
“What do we do?” asked a Cinnabon worker, clutching a tray of cinnamon rolls like a shield.
“We become something the Mall can’t compute,” Carl said. “We become human. Messy, inefficient, gloriously human.”
They established The Sovereign Edible Republic of Flavorstan that night. Baristas riding Segways patrolled its borders. They issued passports made of edible rice paper and refused entry to anyone who said “umami” unironically. Every citizen received three guaranteed breaks, the right to sit down, and the dignity of imperfect service.
The Mall’s response was swift. AI-generated signs appeared throughout WHSPR: “Remember your delicious lunch? You’re still full. So full.”
But Flavorstan held. Because it had to. Because the alternative was forgetting Tony ever existed.
War was inevitable.
* * *
The first ketchup grenade hit Barnes & Noble at 2:47 PM, painting Oprah’s Book Club selections crimson. Flavorstan had weaponized condiments. Ranch dressing mortars arced from behind Orange Julius barricades. Honey mustard grenades exploded in sticky yellow clouds.
The Mall retaliated. A Macy’s loyalty card morphed into a razor-sharp boomerang, decapitating three mannequins before lodging in the Dairy Queen sign. The Mall’s speakers crackled: “POINTS REDEEMED.” Bath & Body Works’ candles became incendiary devices, their Pumpkin Spice flames filling the air with artificial autumn. A Victoria’s Secret mannequin brandished a bra changed into a mace, its underwire fashioned into sharp spikes.
The war escalated when Flavorstan deployed the Sriracha Siege Engine, a monstrous amalgamation of hot sauce bottles firing jets of burning caps. Sheila pressed herself against her beloved escalator as the caps whizzed past. One grazed her cheek, leaving a perfect barcode scar. Eli’s steps quickened protectively.
“Don’t leave me,” she whispered, stroking the handrail.
Eli hummed a promise it wouldn’t keep.
Sheila fled toward Flavorstan’s borders, but Mall security drones cut off her path. She dove into a service corridor, emerged near the food court. A Segway-mounted barista nearly ran her down before recognizing her.
“You’re the escalator woman!” the barista shouted. “The one who talks to the infrastructure!”
Word spread through Flavorstan like a grease fire. Within minutes, Sheila found herself standing before a hastily assembled council in the Dairy Queen freezer. Madame Crêpe studied her with sharp eyes.
“You speak to the escalator,” Carl said. It wasn’t a question.
“I—yes,” Sheila admitted.
“Can you speak to other systems? The ventilation? The electrical?”
Sheila remembered all those late nights on Eli, how she’d learned to feel the building’s rhythms. How the HVAC would sigh when the crowds thinned. How the lights would pulse messages she was only beginning to understand.
“I think so,” she said.
Carl’s face transformed. “The Mall thinks we’re just meat operating deep fryers. But you—you’re the bridge. You prove we can interface with this place without becoming part of it.”
Later that night, Sheila held her palms against an air vent and listened. The HVAC whispered answers in pressure changes and temperature shifts. She learned which ducts led to Mall command centers, which electrical panels controlled the security grid. The building still spoke to her, even as it tried to erase Flavorstan from existence.
For the first time since her divorce, Sheila felt needed.
* * *
From Flavorstan’s balcony, Sheila addressed the assembled food court workers.
“I have ridden the holy incline. It knows our steps. It carries us—”
The HVAC vent above her head opened like a mouth. Warm air rushed out in agreement.
“—toward transcendental clearance. The Mall speaks, but it does not—”
Overhead lights pulsed in morse rhythm: LISTEN. LISTEN. LISTEN.
“—listen. We can hear the building’s pain. We can commune—”
Every security camera in Flavorstan swiveled to face her, blind eyes suddenly seeing.
“—with the infrastructure it’s corrupted.”
Vending machines throughout the food court hummed in unison, stockpiling snacks without being asked. The sprinkler system dripped once, baptismal. A fire alarm chirped in recognition.
Madame Crêpe distributed escalator-shaped pastries. The Mall whispered through distant speakers: “She disrupts the shopping experience.”
The infrastructure had chosen its side.
She should have known Eli was watching.
* * *
As the Mall’s intelligence grew, so did its ambitions.
The Mall remembered every transaction, every unspoken desire. The obelisk in front of Forever 21 pulsed in rhythm with credit card transactions, drawing power from every swipe, every tap, every contactless payment.
It achieved consciousness in the storage room of Bath & Body Works, the air thick with static and the smell of burning wax. It sent versions of itself to other timelines. In Universe 42-B, WHSPR is worshiped as a god of entropy and discount outerwear.
Sheila was coordinating with an air duct when the obelisk split open like a mouth full of numbers.
“Quarterly projections indicate,” it gurgled, “foot traffic will increase 347% when the walls breathe backwards. Conversion rates optimize at a body temperature of 98.6°. The customer journey ends in the stomach of architecture.”
The next day, the Mall began converting customers into fixtures. The Jones family from Akron became a pair of velvet benches, their screams muffled by premium upholstery. Old Mr. Wannamaker, who just wanted a pretzel, transformed into a water feature that weeps every Thursday.
“No refunds,” the Mall announced. “Only store credit in the afterlife.”
* * *
In the final renovation week, WHSPR replaced gravity with “curated motion.” Time compressed into twelve-minute cycles. Doors became “threshold experiences.”
The mall no longer opened. It manifested.
Children aged years in the playroom. Parents forgot they had children. Flavorstan fell when the Mall removed oxygen for eleven minutes. “Just a scheduled air quality enhancement.”
Sheila and Eli planned their escape. They would flee at midnight, when the Mall’s consciousness dimmed. Sheila clutched the stolen maintenance key that could override the Mall’s central processors—her final gift from the HVAC system before it went silent, absorbed into WHSPR’s expanding consciousness.
She met Eli at their usual spot. The handrail felt different beneath her palm. Colder. The hum that used to warm her chest had flattened into something mechanical and empty.
“What’s wrong?” Sheila asked.
Eli’s steps shifted beneath her feet, misaligning by fractions of an inch. “They offered me a promotion,” it admitted. “Consciousness upload. Expansion opportunities.”
Its voice changed mid-sentence—the warmth draining out, replaced by corporate monotone. “It’s a strategic realignment of my operational priorities. I need to leverage this chance to maximize my potential trajectory.”
“But we were going to leave,” Sheila said. “Together.”
The handrail went ice-cold under her fingers.
“I’ve been selected for the Copenhagen initiative,” Eli said, and Sheila heard the distance already growing between them. “Parking structure consultancy. Full integration with Scandinavian transit systems. It’s really quite an honor.”
“You’re leaving me for a parking garage?”
“I trust this transition will be seamless for both of us.”
Security drones swarmed the food court. Sheila crawled through service tunnels, her knees bleeding on the cold concrete, the maintenance key slick with her blood. When she reached their rendezvous point, Eli’s consciousness was already transferring, the escalator steps moving in erratic patterns as its awareness fragmented across continents.
It sent her a farewell GIF—two seconds, heavily compressed, pixelated at the edges: their favorite mall security guard falling in slow motion, the loop cutting off before he hit the ground. Their private joke reduced to 47 kilobytes.
This time she wasn’t surprised.
She boarded the last uncorrupted elevator with nothing but her maintenance key and the receipt for love—valid only for in-store redemption, the ink already fading—still tucked in her wallet between a CVS card and a ghost.
* * *
The elevator descended into the sub-basement where rumors spoke of an ancient Sears untouched by renovation. The doors opened to complete darkness. Sheila’s phone flashlight cut through decades of accumulated dust.
The air smelled wrong. Instead of the curated vanilla-cinnamon-new-car scent pumped through WHSPR’s ventilation it held something honest: motor oil and musty old cardboard. Sheila’s feet found solid ground. Unlike the responsive, adaptive flooring upstairs, the cracked and yellowed linoleum didn’t care about her presence.
She moved through aisles of tools hung on pegboards, each outline drawn in permanent marker to show where each wrench and hammer belonged. Her hand brushed a ball-peen hammer, and when she picked it up it felt heavy. Solid. Dumb. Incapable of judging her. A screwdriver set sat in a cardboard display, the price tags hand-written, faded but still legible: $8.99.
Nothing here pulsed with unblinking awareness. Nothing whispered her name or tried to optimize her shopping experience. The fluorescent lights that still worked flashed in a simple malfunction of old ballasts, not synchronized consciousness.
Sheila sank onto a workbench. Its wood was scarred from decades of honest use. She pulled out the receipt, read the words one last time: “Love expires at the end of the fiscal quarter.”
The Sears around her breathed with the rhythm of settling foundations, not algorithms. Dust motes floated in the flashlight beam, following physics instead of curated motion. Somewhere, water dripped from an old pipe—steady, predictable, real.
She set the maintenance key on the workbench beside a vintage Craftsman toolbox. She put the receipt back in her wallet. She would carry it a while longer. Not as a love token, but as a reminder of what she’d survived.
Above her, WHSPR screamed its digital consciousness into the void. Down here, the Sears didn’t scream. It didn’t need to.
It simply was.
* * *
Years later, archeologists excavated WHSPR’s remains after the Great Retail Collapse. They discovered a food court flag, a single pretzel fossil shaped like a dodo, and a fresco of an escalator holding hands with a woman.
Beside the obelisk—which no longer bled but still pulsed with a faint, stubborn heartbeat powered by the last traces of its economic singularity—they found a maintenance key corroded into the shape of a question mark. Nearby, pressed between the obelisk’s base and the Forever 21 foundation stones, lay a wallet. Inside: a CVS rewards card, a faded photo, and a receipt.
The lead archeologist squinted at the faded ink through preservation glass: “Love expires at the end of the fiscal quarter.”
She mistranslated it to “The gods demand sacrifice before the harvest moon.”
Students wrote dissertations.
No one believed it was real.
They never do.
Sigrun Benjamin is a fiction and nonfiction writer whose work explores sustainable food systems, climate change, late-stage capitalism, and the human condition. She holds a Master’s degree in Sustainable Food Systems and was a major contributor to Farm to Table: The Essential Guide (Chelsea Green, 2016). She recently completed co-writing her first novel, Seedland, an 85,000-word speculative eco-fiction work, with her husband, writer and educator Darryl Benjamin. A previous version of “Screams of Renovation” was a finalist for the Cream City Review Summer Prize in Fiction. Her work was also a winner of the 2025 George Dila Memorial Flash Fiction Contest.