Each morning, the red vest I am forced to wear looks more and more becoming on me. At least I didn’t work at PriceMart. I heard at PriceMart, you have to wear a walkie talkie that spews out advertisements as you do your job. Like having your mother-in-law sewed to your back.
“Fourteen seventy three m'am.” I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to call anyone m’am anymore. Everything’s a damn fight these days.
“Oh,” this woman had been in the store eight times in the last three days. How much birdseed could a person possibly need to buy? But I guess that was none of my business.
“Here you go,” she handed me a twenty and once again said “keep the change.” Most people might think it was creepy that she sat at the bench all day watching the birds across the street. I thought it was kind of beautiful. I didn’t have to be alone in my red vest. My red vest. I didn’t like how that sounded.
“Excuse me, m’am?” she was walking away without her groceries. More and more she was looking more and more lost. Each and every day this old woman would convince me she was ready to live in an alley and conform to hobo culture. That or she was secretly a distracted genius distracted by all the genius floating around in her head. “You forgot your bag…” my voice trailed off.
“Oh.”Her eyes blank.
“M’am can I ask you something?” She stared at me. “Why are you always feeding the birds?”
“Is there a prob-lem here miss?” My supervisor, that walking stereotype, decided it was time to interfere. There can’t be too much conversation in his fine establishment without his consent. Ideas being traded, personalities being discovered. It would economically-ineffectient. It would be chaos!
“No.” She looked at him hatefully. “There isn’t.”
