My name is Ian, I live alone--although I have a girlfriend--and I work as a shift manager for a major supermarket. I see people everyday. When we first open, it's either construction workers grabbing a Monster and a clear-glazed doughnut before work, or mid-shifters coming in to get razors or toilet paper. Later on you get the bored housewives, coming in to do shopping or drop a movie off at the Redbox before hitting the gym. Around lunchtime the local office drones swoop in for a quick lunch from the deli counter. In the afternoon you get families doing their weekly grocery shopping or guys coming in after work to grab some Hungryman dinners or tampons for the missus. Right after dark the shoplifters turn up, usually school-age kids, but sometimes I'll get a homeless guy grazing in the lunchmeats or some lowlife palming the $5.99 DVDs by the registers. I never thought a copy of Anaconda Vs. Alligator was worth going to jail for, but whatever. Apparently these people have never heard of security cameras.
I see all these people, hundreds of them every day, from all walks of life. They come in my store and it seems like for just a little while, I own them. I can duck into the cash office and watch them weave through the aisles on the closed-circuit video feeds, pushing their carts, checking labels, and politely avoiding eye-contact with each other. I watch them put items in their carts, and for a moment or two, I feel like Farmer McGregor watching Peter Rabbit's family nibbling at my garden.
My mom always used to read those stories for bedtime, Flopsy, Mr. Tod, and all the rest, and I would go to sleep with prose ringing in my head.
"First he ate some lettuces and some French beans; and then he ate some radishes."
Mom was good to me, she was my protector. When cancer put her down, it was hard. I sat with her in the hospital, surrounded by flowers and cards, and watched her breathing get slower and slower. I watched her pink lips turn blue. Pink and blue, those were the colors of the flowers at her funeral. Someone told me that pink symbolized life and blue meant sympathy. To me, pink meant before, and blue meant after, and both of them made me think of the soft beeping noise that got slower and slower before it finally became one long steady flat note.
It wasn't long after the funeral I started taking walks through the park.
rating: 5
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