The woman in front of me at the grocery store looks a little bit like a bird. She’s far too thin, her glasses make her eyes look massive and she has a nervous manner, hopping stiffly from one foot to the other. Her basket is full of organic carrots, a couple of bags of seeds and some rice cakes. It strikes me that there’s probably no more than 80 calories in that entire basket. I imagine her, like a bird, eating one sesame seed at a time.
When it’s time to pay, she pulls out her debit card and looks back at me, shooting me a sour look. She hunches over, as if protecting her test answers from a copy cat, making sure that I don’t steal her code as she punches in her numbers. Her world is a dangerous place. Calories, code thieves, pesticides!
Behind me, a man who is in his mid 50’s snorts. He can’t believe she’s making such a display of her privacy. This makes the woman, who I suddenly realized has a similar pigmentation to a carrot, even more rigid. The man smiles at me. We’re on the same page, he thinks. He’s buying ten cans of orange juice. Nothing else.
The cashier has ash-white hair and his name is Simon. He’s in the dozy, indifferent trance that we all fall into when we’ve been doing a repetitive task for many hours. He makes some mistake, and then mumbles some request into the microphone. He then just stands there, blankly staring off at some imagined horizon. The man behind me spins around in a circle, his arms outstretched, looking for support. “What is this fucking bullshit?! Come, on!” Everybody in the line-up inches forward and pretends to be reading the tabloid headlines. Simon stares out the window. The carrot/bird woman collects more evidence that the world is a hostile and dangerous place.