Lost in Translation
"Maybe he could've been a hero."
This is thought by a lonesome fly in the supermarket. It's life has not been long, but it has grown upon musing over the lives of the customers in the supermarket. The fly's puny brain has just latched onto it's newest victim and was growing a collage of arms and legs upon their sufficiencies.
"The mediocre man soaked in his mediocrity till any vestiges of his potential had long since been watered into numbness"
The fly is of the tragic archetypal - spinning everything into some sort of pathetical situation. (But it was quite pathetic itself, so can you blame it for viewing everything else as it viewed itself?)
"Pulling together his groceries, he peeked up barely over the rim of his collar. The grocery lady smiled up at him."
Her Harvard graduate face shined as she pulled a bottle of milk over the scanner. The fringes of her short hair waved as she moved
"as if there was a wind blowing in that cold grocery store, the hovel of a fly."
The man's face brightened under hers, until he casually tucked it back in again "an immediate reaction" of one unaccustomed to the unwavering smile of an ivy league graduate that found herself shelving canned goods that would be inevitably knocked over by some toddler in red shoes.
The fly began to cry.
"He was afraid that after all, the truth was, and it so was, that she only smiled because his milk paid her to do so."