It’s the little sins that wear your soul away…
It is, at the end of the day, a little ridiculous, he decided. Waiting in line, five deep, for a bottle of water. It was of course his own damn fault, but how could he have known? Who even goes into convenience stores any more? Slow people, people without bank cards to use to just pay outside. People like this first guy in line, with personal fucking checks. A check! For five dollars in gas, a bag of chips, and one of those god-awful tabloid magazines. Who even wrote checks? He didn’t think he even had any, or at any rate he wouldn’t know where to find them. And now he had to wait in line for all the I’s to be dotted, T’s to be crossed, identification to be checked, because he had to have a drink of water.
And of course, next would be the lottery expert; that rarefied and lovely specimen of humanity who not only believed it possibly (even likely!) to win the damn thing, but who felt it was vital to make the right choices. Five of that card, three of this… what do you mean that game ended? Clearly the winning strategy of the Christmas-themes scratcher was flawed in some inherent way. And then, the numbers… Some people played their birthday, their anniversary, those goddamn numbers for that TV show; but the lottery expert played all of these and more, in a dizzying display of mathematicaly fluidity, made somewhat less interesting by the fact that it DIDN’T FUCKING MATTER.
All these and more, queued up mindlessly to transact their excruciatingly mundane business, and he bearing witness to it because he just have to have a Poland Springs at that moment. Talk about mundane. There they were, counting out their exact change, trying to figure out how to get back a dime instead of three pennies, failing, and throwing said pennies into the insultingly paternalistic “Take a Penny, Leave a Penny” tray. Disgusted, perhaps at the fetid brown coins, perhaps at their own inability to subtract small numbers, or perhaps… well, who knows what else? Finally, he got through the biomass to pay his $1.07. Fucking ridiculous was what it was, and nobody’s fault but his own. It was worth it, though, for the look on the bored teenager’s face when he scooped up every penny in that disgusting tray, turned, and walked out to his car.
