“Welcome to Wisteria Market. Have a healthy, sunshiny day.”
That phrase dug, claws deep, into my brain. The announcement played at least a hundred times a day . . . not that I counted . . . anymore.
Every summer, for the past three years, Mr. Villalobos assigned me the zero six thirty to fifteen hundred hours shift at the market. Mom was military, and the folks ‘round here assumed I loved getting up before the damp hay soaking the air had dissipated.
My eyes lost focus through the gooey remains of sleep, and my constant yawning sucked in mouthfuls of freshly-mopped-yet-somehow-stale fumes that permeated the store. The shelves of dog food sat there with their labels in mismatched directions, waiting for me to adjust them—one can at a time, like some psychopath.
The scrape and squeak of a shopping cart alerted me that our first customer had gone from standstill to roamer. Probably an early-bird local, who liked to beat the afternoon crowd—better known as that onslaught of out-of-towners who grabbed snacks on the way to the real tourist destinations along the coast.
The speakers in the ceiling crackled—a prelude to the staticky-gritty torture of looped music.
A prehistoric beast could surface from Moon Crater Lake, march over the hills, make a pit stop in our tumbleweed-ridden town, and still, Wisteria Market would never change their greeting or their selection of lost-era songs meant to make shoppers lose track of time.
The loop played loudest in aisle nine—this pasty-yellow linoleum stretch where I currently worked
