Writings » The Clerk's Quarry

The Clerk's Quarry

By Cardboard Warmachine at 2007-10-12 | Printable version

   There is a fine red line between the weighty privlidges that come with wearing a brown-baggers apron, and those that sadly, do not. After twenty months working at SuperPantry, I had thought that I had a fairly good handle on those shining nuggets of power that I was able to mete out like lightning from the fist of Zeus; until recently however, I never knew how deeply my power ran.
    Ten hours behind a dirty conveyor belt can drag on like Russian torture if you don't find your 'thing.' Alice, the 70 year old who had been working these flourescent bathed aisles since Elvis could still fit in jeans, worked the word puzzles; crosswords, jumbles, and more recently, sudoku. Whenever things got slow, she would pull out her brightly colored book, the kind you find at your grandmother's house next to a three week old TV-Guide and a handheld video poker.
    My friend Joel plays games on his cellphone. He's a real douche about it too. "Can your cellphone play Doom? Because mine can." Karyn, the bitchy teen queen, says she writes poetry, but we all know that she's planning out the wedding that she is expecting her poor neutered chump of a boyfriend to give her. Tommy counts tiles... he isn't very bright.
    Myself, I work the young crowd.
    Not in the "I'm Chris Hanson, have a seat over there," sort of way. I mean when their mothers arent looking.
    Every day, dozens of tiny little a-holes to be come through mystore, still stinking of feces and mother's milk; their chubby faces framing smug smiles that rip at my soul like the beaks of carrionbirds. It's all I can do to keep from punching them right in the tooth.
    So I started messing with them. Mom fishes into her cavernous purse for 30 cents off tissues, while her fart-faced little kid sits in the baby seat of the carriage, slapping his chubby fists and showering me with his putrid spittle. That's when I strike.
    It started simple; mom looks away, I flip the kid the bird, he keeps grinning like the little mongoloid he is, and we all end up happy. Next came the scary faces; screwing up my mug into some ghoulish mask of terror, and pulling it off just when he starts to bawl and grab his mother's attention again. Then, like all things, it escalated. Soon I was using a straw that I concealed in my apron to shoot balled up pieces of register tape right at their bulbous little heads; knocking items out of the cart, like eggs, or jars of baby food, and then blaming the kid when Mom finally comes out of her coupon coma.
    I had a nice system going, untill the kid in the red hat.
    He came in, like all the others, riding in the high seat of the carriage, like some tiny pharoh atop his gilded caravan, mother subserviently in tow. It was a Saturday, and she must have been stocking up for the week, so I was looking at some serious time to work with here. I flashed my obligitory smile, assuring her that I was a danger to neither her, nor her vile spawn.
    Finally, she gets to loading up the ol' belt. I flip the switch, shutting off the rollers, and get to work.
    At first, the child pays me no mind. He looks to be about that toddler no-age; the generic face on every package of diapers, and brightly colored toy I ring up every day. He wore a velvety red cap that hid the stringy hair and fontanelle still knitting together his lumpy head. I burned a hole into the side of his head with my stare, just waiting for eye contact, but he was a stubborn one.
    "Excuse me, there's no room left on the belt."
    I snapped back to where I was, and shot out that prize-winning smile once more, flipped on the belt, and began to scan the items. I gazed back at my quarry, just waiting for him to turn my way. I figured I would start him with a few monster faces, and then perhaps the water pistol in the ear while Mom was coupon hunting, or signing the credit tablet.
    "Damn scanner," I mumbled under my breath after passing a box of crackers over it numerous times to no avail. I held the box up, scouring for the barcode when I felt it. Like a rock ricocheting off of a car windsheild, a penny struck me squarely in the temple. My first instinct was to cry out an obscenity, but this was neither the time nor place. I whipped my head around, waiting to see Joel standing two aisles away, phone in one hand, roll of coins in another, with a smug grin on his face. Instead, what I saw was the child with the red hat, sputtering gleefully at me, his round fist full of glinting change.
    That smarmy little turd drew first blood, and now it was on. I gritted my teeth, and snarled at the child.
    "Are you growling at my son?"
    I cleared my throat.
    "Heh, sorry m'aam, just have a bit of a tickle today..."
    She warily returned her attention to the remaining items in her cart. My time was running low. Red hat slapped his lips together, making a popping noise that made me want to bash his skull with a clawhammer. I reached into my apron, and grasped at the neon-green translucent pistol freshly filled with chilled sinkwater. Once Mom gets closer to the register, it becomes far harder to fire upon the child, so I siezed my window, drew, and fired.
    Just then, the child threw up his plasma deflector sheild, amplifying the volume of the water, and redirecting it right back at my crotch. It hit like a fireman's hose, instantly ruining any credibility that I didn't wet my pants.
    I whipped my glance back at Mom, who was still finishing up loading up her bags. Luckily nobody had noticed. Unfortunatly, they would noticed what followed.
    "You greasey little cornhole!" I lunged at the cart, knocking Red hat out of the cart onto the sticky grocery store floor. My mind went blank as my base instincts took over. I became a swirling torrent of fists, and hate, and sweat. I pinned him down like I was wrestling a live croc and not a 15 month old infant, and layed angry fist, after angry fist into his soft, vulnerable flesh.
    After  uppercutting him into the air, I grabbed him by his tiny Nike, and swung him around like an Olympic hammerthrow gold-medalist, and tossed him through the plate glass window of the storefront with a violent flourish. He travelled for over 200 yards before skidding to a halt in the Home Depot parking lot across the street, screaming like the little fart-eater he was the whole way.
    I stood in front of the ruined window, posed like an Adonis, my apron rippling heroicly in the breeze, the child's mother swooning in my arms, and a raw steak clenched between my teeth. Today was the day, I became a man.