CIGARETTE BREAK
The store always seemed to reek of under achievement and struggle. The too-good-to-be-true prices welcomed every sector of humanity’s grime—like this old woman, standing in front of her. Kira stood at the register, waiting for the woman to finish digging through her change purse, and found herself fixated on the yellow stain—presumably mustard—on the woman’s white, boxy sweatshirt. It was branded in the center of her chest, as her most memorable characteristic. Not even her three missing teeth stood a chance. She bought two snickers bars, a jar of cheese dip and a spoon. It was hard for Kira not to cringe. A surprising reaction, since throughout her eight months of working at the Dollar Tree, she thought she was immune all of the gut wrenching combinations of one dollar merchandise that people would soon be shoveling into their half rotten mouths.
Once the mustard lady paid her two dollars and ninety-seven cents, Kira walked outside for her self-declared cigarette break. Kira used to ask Tonya beforehand, but it seemed as though she would always be overly startled and agitated at Kira’s presence in her closet of an office, and would quickly close her browser, scrunching her eyebrows in agreement to whatever Kira requested. To avoid the discomforting glimpse of Tonya’s online dating experience, Kira just stepped outside, turned the corner and at the first chance of solitude, sunk down into a small unrecognizable ball. She stuck her face far into her lap, hoping the act would take her into another dimension.
Her eyes were tired and smeared with leftover eye make-up from three days ago and as she closed them she felt her body melt into the concrete. After about fifteen seconds of paralysis, she lifted her head and lit up a cigarette.
“Why do you look like that?” Her hypnotic trace was broken by a kid who couldn’t be over the age of 12. He pointed to his head, gestured towards her haircut and piercings, and scrunched his face like a deranged fetus. He was standing to her right, leaning back against the wall, with one foot hiked up behind him for support, while he aggressively fingered through a pouch of Sour Patch Kids.
“The same reason your mother didn’t abort you.” His face crumpled up again in that same unappealing way as he pondered her words and licked grains of sugar from his lips. She looked away from him, denying his presence.
She immediately spotted the old mustard lady stumbling around in the far distance of the parking lot with the plastic bag containing her newly purchased items slung over her shoulder like a purse. She thought about how perhaps the stain was cheese, not mustard. Maybe all she eats is cheese. And that is why she’s so sad all the time. She has nothing to stimulate her brain. She has no connection to her mind, no connection to the earth, no interests. She’s lost in a limbo of eating cheese dip to make it just one more day, to merely survive.
She looked closely at the lady and saw that she was picking up trash from the ground and putting it into a separate plastic bag. Her back was severely arched forward and each step held a pause in between, a pause that suggested a surge of pain radiating throughout her decaying body. She then stopped to look at her watch, allowing her wispy gray mane to swirl angrily in the wind. Knowledge of the time seemed to indicate a reminder of punctuality and she walked toward the overflowing trashcan, placed the plastic bag on top, turned the corner and was gone.
Kira found herself stuck, staring at the corner of the Walgreens where the lady had disappeared. She looked down and found that her cigarette had burned all the way to the filter. She whipped her head to the right and the boy was gone.