Anna K. Young The seedless watermelon changes sizes between the giant bin with the yellow sign and my checkout lane. With a huff, the lady hefts it onto the conveyor belt—I notice her platinum blond coif doesn’t sway under the heaving ceiling vent like it should. Her sweat makes a network of pale veins through her fake tan. If I look too long, they throb menacingly.
The watermelon swells one last time as it rolls down the belt and comes to rest on the water-stained glass scale built into the checkout counter. Bored, I punch in the code. Fruits and vegetables don’t get names, they get numbers—all of which start with the number four. The poor watermelon gazes up at me through streaky green eyes.
I’m about to console it with a pat on the head, but I’m cut off by the Platinum Lady. “Seventeen dollars?” she screeches.
“Shh.” I hazard a glance around my station and see Manager Stacey behind the cigarette counter. Her glare is already waiting for me. Well, shit. Now I’m in it.
And shushing Platinum Lady only makes her louder. “That sign on the watermelon bin—” she jabs a pointy orange nail at it as if I wouldn’t know where it is, “—says thirty-eight cents.”
“Per pound,” I say on reflex. It’s not the first time today a customer has made that mistake.
But it is the first time today I’ve made the mistake of correcting someone. “I know that,” she snaps. “I weighed it over there, and it was only twenty pounds. Maybe you don’t know how to multiply—” another pointy orange jab, this time at my name tag, “—but that should be less than ten dollars!”
While she punches out the math on her phone calculator on the other side of the counter and holds it up for me to read each step, I nod vacantly. The watermelon’s swollen gaze begs me to look down and roll it off the scale, over the counter, and into the filthy alcove where I stash used grocery baskets until Al (the teenage one) whisks them away to the front of the store.
“Sorry,” I whisper to the melon while the lady finishes her math lesson.
“You should be,” she snarls. “Trying to cheat me like that.”
I look at the screen. “But it’s not a twenty-pound watermelon,” I explain, pointing. “It’s forty-four pounds.”
“What?” As the lady squints at the screen, the number ticks up.
“Forty-eight pounds,” I say, monotone. “It’s still going up, I guess.”
“Take it off the scale!”
I put a protective hand on the watermelon’s cool shell. “Are you going to buy it?” The number ticks up again. “Nineteen dollars and thirty-eight cents, now. It’s fifty-one pounds. It’s a good watermelon.”
“Fine!”
Platinum Lady tears through her purse for a twenty-dollar bill and shoves it at me. Reluctant, I haul the watermelon into a paper bag as its tears roll over my fingers. When I hand it to the lady, she almost drops it.
She staggers under the weight, but her angry gaze never flinches. “Change.”
The register chatters open. “Sixty-two cents,” I say as I drop the coins into her palm. “Keep an eye on those pennies, too. They have a habit of becoming Canadian in the parking lot.”
***
Manager Stacey stalks over about three times a day, on average. If I’m lucky, two of those times are just so she can tell me to clean my spotless conveyor belt. That one’s not so bad, because my hands don’t mind being trapped in that motion: wax on, wax off, I murmur when it happens, and imagine myself in a Japanese bonsai garden while the lemon-scented wet wipes do their thing. Sometimes I’m even a little sad when a customer approaches and the conveyor belt releases me from its hold.
But at least once a day, Manager Stacey has something to say about my attitude. Today, it’s about Platinum Lady.
“What happened back there?” she growls as she steps in front of the next customer in my line.
The guy looks like he’s about to say something, but no sound comes out when he opens his mouth. The color drains from him and the others; the store behind them, fluorescent-lit aisles of red-and-yellow labels, fades out of focus.
Manager Stacey used to make me cry when she’d cuss me out for processing checks wrong or forgetting to scan a customer’s coupons. Now, I collect my tears in a Big Gulp cup that lives in the center console of my car before I clock in. Saves big bucks on tissues (one sixty-six per box, but only if you buy them in quantities of three).
Stacey’s eyes bug at me in a way that suggests she’s actually waiting for an answer. “Watermelon got big again,” I say. “That shipment is a rascally bunch.”
“I don’t care,” Stacey says. Her brown hair pulses and curls. “You give the customer what they want. If she says her watermelon is twenty pounds, you make that shit twenty pounds. You’re here to make the customer happy.” She lowers her voice. “And don’t forget, you’re nothing without the Golden Paycheck.”
The customer might be happy, but what about the watermelons? My tear ducts squeeze and pump and wheeze as Manager Stacey rants, to no avail—only a dry puff of salt escapes. I make a mental note to empty out the Big Gulp cup this week. It’s getting full. Or maybe I can hang a stick in the water and make a salt crystal lollipop for Manager Stacey, as a gift.
***
The watermelons get bigger, and the paychecks get smaller. By the time I get out to my car, it’s dwindled down to almost nothing. I tuck it under a big rock in my center console and shut the lid hard. The bank is closed for the weekend, and my paychecks have a nasty habit of disappearing before I can get in the door on Monday.
An empty plastic bag swishes across the parking lot, a tumbleweed in Purgatory’s polluted desert. The summer sun melted away long ago, leaving the strip mall and the plains beyond in a dusky lavender haze. I know if I go home now, I’ll blink out of existence when I exit my car and reappear tomorrow morning in my sweaty non-slip Sketchers, name tag secured to the skin over my chest, feet cemented behind the checkout stand.
So I can’t go home.
The headlights on my scuzzy sedan flicker every time I hit a pothole. Around here, it’s like driving with a strobe light strapped to the fender. The cottonwood trees alongside the highway flash in, out, in, out, in, until Jim’s Super-Mart-O-Rama materializes under a dim streetlight tilted over a spread of cracked asphalt. I pull into the lot and get out, buy a Deluxe Size Ice Cream Blaster Bar, get back in.
The freeway looms, a roaring river of red streaks. I bump over the ramp and pull into the left lane, drive sixty, seventy-five, ninety miles per hour. The Blaster Bar keeps my teeth company while I press the gas pedal until the bones in my foot crack and the other cars blip past in flashes too fast to see. I only know they’re there because of the slight gravitational pull that tries to yank my steering wheel to the right.
But it’s the same every night. No matter how fast I drive, how far west or north or east I travel, my car ends up stopped in the driveway outside my apartment, and the last thing I always remember is stepping out before I wake up in the store.
***
When it happens again, this time with a party tray of chips n’ dip that multiplies into five trays on the conveyor belt, Manager Stacey hauls me into the back office and thunks me down at a white table surrounded by white walls. She slams a peeling white binder in front of me shortly after—the dreaded Employee Manual.
“Read this,” she demands, “and don’t come back out until you’re done.”
I sigh when she’s out of earshot and prop my head on my hand. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead—or is it the flies trapped inside? Their shadows flit around and make it hard to read the tiny print on each page inside the binder. In tinny voices, they scream and beg for me to free them, free them.
I try to skim, but the Manual won’t let me. The faster I read, the longer it gets. Pages form in stacks, so many that the numbers in the bottom corners run out and become fly corpses instead, crushed deep into the weave of the paper.
“Thou shalt not steal,” I read aloud, desperate. Another hundred pages jam themselves into the torn plastic pockets in the back and spill onto the floor. “Wash your hands, brush your teeth, sing Happy Birthday twice, and sleep on your left side so as to maximize productivity.” I try flipping backward, but the pages just start to collect at the front instead. “The Company will take care of you. The Company will let no harm befall you if you are faithful and true; verily thus saith the Company unto [Employee], and [Employee] believed.”
Papers pool around my feet. I cough, and a crumpled page leaps out of my mouth. Others crinkle in my lungs and leave scratchy little papercuts inside my throat. The flies, the lights, they buzz louder and louder and louder…
I read all night, and no one comes back for me. When I can keep my eyes open no longer, I blink once and appear back at the checkout stand.
***
A customer asks if I’m stupid, and my lunch break gets cut in half to five minutes. I chug my cup of tears in the sweltering parking lot for quick electrolytes. Manager Stacey sentences me to help Al (the old one) clean the meat locker behind the deli section. Al’s joints freeze first, but I’m able to fight it for about another hour—the extra saltwater in my system helps lower my freezing point—before frost locks my eyes open and stops my hand just short of the door.
Manager Stacey just shakes her head when she finds me. She tips me onto a rusted dolly and wheels me up to my checkout stand. The customers don’t seem to notice that I can neither smile nor move. They put Teenage Al behind the meat counter after that and don’t talk about Old Al anymore.
***
Barcodes beep. Customers whine. Shopping cart wheels squeak.
When I can take it no longer, I scream and thrash against the quicksand that anchors me to my spot behind the stand. The customers recoil in fear and Manager Stacey storms toward me, but I break free just before she can grab my arm and sprint toward the break room. I laugh and laugh and thank the stars I can still run—most of the others, including Manager Stacey, were reduced to stomping or limping long ago.
The endless row of lockers in the break room beckons me into the void, but I close my eyes and trail my fingers along the cold metal until I feel a locker that’s warm, with a fast heartbeat. I yank it open and lunge for the Golden Paycheck before it can retreat into the dark beyond. With a triumphant scream, I tear it in half, then shred the pieces.
Manager Stacey stomps into the doorway just in time to see. She screeches my name, but that doesn’t stop me, not anymore. Even so, I don’t have much time. The weakness of hunger and thirst creeps up in my throat, and sickness rattles in my lungs as the fading gold pieces of the paycheck drop to the floor and crumble into dust. It was the only thing keeping me alive—and the only thing keeping me here.
I dodge around Stacey, Manager no longer, and past the line of checkout stands. The store has lost all motion; the cashier’s eyes are dull as customers freeze, mid-rant, fists of coupons raised and faces red with anger. Still running, I scoop an oversized watermelon off the nearest conveyor belt and tuck it under my arm like a football. The cashier’s eyes follow me, but he can’t move, not like I can.
The exit is so close, but I turn around to make one more stop. In the blanched back office, I use the last of my strength to fulfill the watermelon’s last request and toss it upward into the fluorescent lights. The melon cheers and bursts like a hot pink firework; the plastic shatters and frees the swarm of flies within. They swirl around me once and pour out of the office in a buzzing river. I run with them toward the exit. The sliding glass doors try to close on me, but I make a mad dash and squeeze through with the last of the flies.
I burst into the parking lot at dusk and kick the Sketchers off my feet. I skip and shout, even as my stomach shrivels and my lungs fill with phlegm. A tumbleweed bounces past—a real one.
The flies disperse into the violet sky and become a scattering of black stars.
Anna K. Young holds an MFA in creative writing from Western Washington University, where she taught English 101 and read submissions for the Bellingham Review. Alongside a forthcoming novella with Running Wild Press, her fiction has been featured in Cutleaf Literary Journal and Mortal Mag in 2022. Her other work has appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig’s online poetry journal and Crack the Spine’s “The Year” anthology.
Why we chose this piece: We love the absurdism and surrealism in this story, and Anna’s voice pops. The tear dust and watermelon imagery are excellent. We also enjoyed her sense of humor and how she explores the life of working the dreaded bread job.
