Walmart Checkout Line
A fiction.
That night was filled with anxiety and desperation; my sweat poured down in torrents — except at certain intervals, when it was interrupted by the loud shriek of a middle-aged white woman with an unchecked ego, sweeping down the aisles (for it is in Walmart that this scene takes place), rattling the plastic toy displays, and fiercely stirring the unstable attitude of the sixteen-year-old, poorly paid, who struggled against the onslaught of last-minute shoppers.
There I stood, holding my unopened copy of How to Improve Your Writing in Five Easy Steps, standing on my two sore feet, bruised purple from a day of teaching calculus to a group of wide-eyed freshmen in front of a whiteboard, rocking back and forth slightly to relieve the pressure on each foot in turn, at the back of the customer service line, which twisted like a ball python around the corner and past the self-checkout machines where a group of elderly shoppers, well past their bedtime, were trying (and failing) to scan the last of the pre-made pies from the bakery section; and I wondered why I had waited until the last day of the 30-day return period to get $11.99 in store credit for the book my coworker gave me for my birthday after I briefly mentioned in a meeting that I had a passing interest in writing as a distraction from the dense textbooks on integration in abstract measure spaces, debating…
