‘Wayside destinations, by and large, keep to the interstates and outskirts of places where more normal life tends to occur, but there are certain points of interest that thrive in the cities as well and that is the case for ‘The Missing Piece,’ a store located and prominently advertised in Dallas proper. Listed separately as a ‘boardgame’ and ‘toy’ store, the owner, Patricia Sorgen, tends to disappoint potential customers and then leverage that disappointment to wow them. She does stock pieces that, taken in total, likely add up to thousands of boardgames and toys. Individually, though, these pieces are not much to look at.
To be inside ‘The Missing Piece’ is to be inside one of those old library card catalogs. It is roughly the size and shape of a studio apartment but it is chock full of shelves and each shelf has a series of little drawers with cryptic labels that mean something only to Sorgen. Sorgen herself greets customers and, after explaining that, no, she doesn’t sell whole toys or boardgames, usually performs a medium-like trick in which she guides visitors to a game or puzzle or favorite action figure of their past and asks them to describe when and where a piece of that item went missing. Often with very little to go on, Sorgen is then able to produce that piece from one of her drawers and, though the actual toy or boardgame may be long gone, the visitor tend to pay for it, just as a souvenir, and that is how Sorgen makes her money.
As to how she manages to keep such an inventory, well, that’s up to some debate.’
Sorgen is thin- her hair straight and white and her clothes simple but carefully ironed. She navigates the shelves with a precision that must come from decades of this work. She opens a small drawer in the back and it rattles, plastic on wood. She withdraws something small and returns.
“Was it this one?” She asks. It’s not really a question. She knows that it is.
Sorgen places, in my hand, the small green projectile I described as having lost on a road trip with my parents. It is rounded and translucent, meant to be a sorcerous fireball launched from the hand of an old wizard robot I owned when I was seven. The fireball was lost between dinner and dessert at a restaurant and then, because we still needed to get to the hotel, there wasn’t much time to look for it. I’ve thought a lot about this fireball over the years.
And it is the same fireball. I turn it over in my palm and run my finger over the divots my sister left there, briefly chewing it before the plastic was snatched away from her.
“Do you… take these things?” I ask.
Sorgen smiles. “Of course not. That would be a very difficult way to make money.”
Money is not the only thing that is traded on the Wayside- I’ve learned that much between then and now. I wonder if Sorgen isn’t some sort of emotional vampire or some demon that thrives on the fulfilment of old debts. She is visibly upset when I hand it back to her.
“I think it was a different color.” I tell her. “But thanks for checking.”
I suppose it will sit in the back of my mind a while longer, that little piece of plastic. And I’ll always know where to get it when I’m ready to pay the price.
-traveler
