People Spend $4 for 5 Hardboiled Eggs in a Bag
It’s a busy Sunday shift, there’s four registers open, all packed with housewives and children, young vegan millennials and lost baby boomers clutching doctor’s instructions. The organic supermarket I’ve been working at is like a Trader Joe’s but smaller, with less deals (on things that already shouldn’t be so expensive.)
I’m checking away and thinking and thinking and thinking, into one of those anxiety spirals I get on my shift.
...What are you doing here? You have a college degree! Email those people back! Try harder! Can you live off your thirteen hours a week at the library job? Quit! QUiT! Run like the building is on fire! No, no, you can’t just run out. You have to uphold a good community reputation. Work two more weeks here, til the checks come in from the city. Balance both jobs. Fuck this town, drop everything! Move away! What are you doing here?! You could be home writing—
I pause, notice the bag in my hand is eggs, shelled, pre-hardboiled eggs, only five of them, in a plastic bag for $3.99. They’re strange, squishy, kinda rolling and lolling around in there, making the bag hard to hold onto. Something about them makes me want to vomit.
“Are these good?” I ask the customer.
“Oh, I love them!” she replies, waving her hand around in the air as she speaks. The diamond on her finger is the size of the hope diamond.
I close out her order. (It comes out to $308.72.) She walks away.
One of my coworkers comes up to the register from the seafood department to flirt with the high school age cashier adjacent to me.
“What’s on your shirt?” she asks.
“Oh water, it’s a job that gets you wet. Hehe... get it.”
I roll my eyes and he looks at me.
“I get the feeling you don’t like me Alana,” he says.
“That joke was terrible.”
I stare at the clock, two more hours til close. The anxiety spiral starts again.
…Check your email. Go on indeed. Send your work into a publication. You’re terrible, you ain’t shit. You got this though, you’ve already got a second job, just dump this one!...
A new customer drops their basket on the conveyor belt with a thud...
origamiaround
izzy806
annaxmalina
discoholicmusic
blakekathryn
ellievsbear
jbbartram-illu
germansingergirl