Aubree stepped on a woman’s foot.

"Ow." The woman’s wrinkly face clenched in pain. She whispered: "My foot... My foot..."

"I'm sorry." Aubree's eyes immediately drifted around the aisle. Honey Nut Cheerios. Frosted Flakes. Chicken and Waffles.

"I'm fine," the woman said.

"I didn't know your foot was there."

"Well, it was. And I said I’m fine." The woman began to limp away.

"Do you—" Aubree stammered. "Do you want me to get my manager?"

The woman laughed. "Is your manager a doctor?"

"Do you need a doctor?" Aubree said. But the woman just kept limping away. Aubree went back to restocking groceries.

She put a raw chicken back on the shelf. It sorta looked like the woman's face.

Soon Aubree was back on register.

A couple hours later, her closing manager Mike clocked in. Ten minutes late, as usual.

"How's it going, Aubree?" He pretended to write something on the pin-pad of Aubree's register. He was around twenty-five— a couple years younger than her, though his scraggly brown beard and dark eyes made him look older.

"Alright, I guess," she said. "How are you?"

He smirked. "I wanna fucking die."

Aubree forced a smile back.

It was busy the rest of the day. Because of the Fourth of July, probably. The Fourth of July was always good for business. All the regulars showed up. The creepy guy with a thick gray mustache came to her line. He handed her a box of noodles and said: "How's it goin', sweetie?"

"Good."

"Got any plans this weekend?"

"No."

"Any dates?"

Aubree scanned the box and and gave it back to him.

"You can stop by my place if you want,” he said laughing. “You know I’m just kiddin’. Here you go, sweetie.” He paid cash and left.

Aubree's nose twitched.

That Kiss song played over the loudspeaker for the millionth time. A baby had been crying for a whole half-hour. The scanners on all the registers kept beeping and beeping like a poorly conducted chorus of robots.

Customer after customer after customer. They shuffled in mindless throngs towards the checkout lines with giant cart-fulls of groceries.

“Hi. How are you?”

“Do you have a loyalty card?”

“Would you like a bag for this?”

“Thanks. Have a nice day.”

Aubree had repeated the same greetings and partings and questions hundreds and hundreds of times— so many, that her words had long since lost all meaning, and barely even sounded like English.

A guy budged to the front of her line with a long receipt. "Hey. The grapes were supposed to be on sale for two-ninety-nine. But they came up as twelve-ninety-three." He shoved the receipt into her hands. "And you charged me twice for the chips."

"Oh. Sorry."

"I want a refund for both."

Aubree read through the long list.

Spaghetti. Ham. Mangos. Teriyaki sauce. Corn on the cob. Cat food. American cheese. Black beans. Tater tots. Almond milk. Tasty Cakes. …

Her eyes glazed over. Letters and numbers mingled together into shapeless blotches of ink. "I'm sorry. I—I can't find them on the list."

"Can't find them?" He scoffed. What a stupid woman, he must have thought. Stupid. Illiterate. Inept. "The grapes are right there," he said. "Halfway down. Just look. With your eyes."

Suddenly: "Okay. I see them," Aubree said, louder than she meant to. "So the grapes are actually two-ninety-nine per pound. Not per bag"

Tearing the receipt from her hands, he scrutinized the fine text. She watched him for a while. The woman next in line rolled her eyes.

"Can you start checking us out, please?" she said to Aubree.

“I'm sorry." Aubree's face flushed. "You're right. I should've been—"

The woman cut her off. "My father's sick in the hospital, and needs soup. Now. So let's speed this up, okay?"

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Okay. Okay. Sorry.”

“Hey, wait a minute.” The man with the receipt glared at her. “You still need to refund me for the chips.”

The woman rolled her eyes again, but said nothing. Everyone was silent. What was Aubree supposed to do? Biting the inside of her lip, she decided to refund the chips first. It would take only a few seconds, afterall. But while she started doing that, she thought she heard the woman mutter: “Unbelievable…”

Huh? Had Aubree made the wrong choice, then? Should she have asked the man to wait until the line cleared?

Her nose kept twitching for the next five hours. By the end, her whole face was numb.

Now she could go home. Hurrah.

The drive was only ten minutes. Whenever she drove home, Aubree would always pass a steel factory made up of giant metal tubes and girders and an exhaust pipe that spewed black fumes into the air all day every day. Because of the timing, she'd always see the same middle-aged woman sitting on a company bench, smoking, her dark eyes sunk down on the pavement.

Home. Her mother was watching TV.

"How was your day?" her mother said.

Aubree thought about Mike's answer.

"Alright, I guess,” she said, heading for the stairs. “Feeling kinda tired. I’m gonna head to bed.”

Her mom took a sip of wine. “Fine. Whatever.”

“Huh?”

“It’s just, I thought we could watch a movie together,” her mom said. “But I guess you’re always too tired for anything.”

Aubree clutched the stair railing. Her eyes lingered on a painting of a meadow that hung over the fireplace.

“Goodnight, Aubree,” her mom said.

“Goodnight, mom.”

Aubree lay in bed, on her phone, scrolling. Through Youtube, mostly. She used to watch a lot of video essays about movies, especially Ghibli or Disney movies. After a while, she had exhausted those topics, and resorted to videos about films she didn't particularly like, or care about, like anything about superheroes. She just liked hearing people talk.

But tonight, she couldn’t stomach watching anything in her recommendations.

“Why Ant-Man 2 is a Cinematic Disaster”

“The Secret Genius of Minions: The Rise of Gru”

“Nihilism in Rick and Morty”

Her mind numbed, and her neck ached as she scrolled and scrolled, descending deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and—

You are twenty-seven years old.

She tossed her phone onto the bed.

Now she was searching her closet for one of her old sketchbooks. She found one, buried under some binders and notebooks from high school. She skimmed through it, tasting the decade’s worth of dust that had floated up from the pages. Her drawings were pretty alright. A little amateurish, sure; the heads were too small, and the legs were too long. But they seemed like a promising start. She had filled nearly every page with original characters, mostly from her movie concept.

She grabbed a pencil and opened up a blank page. She pressed the pencil tip against the rough paper, and moved her hand. But it felt wrong and disorienting, like driving a car with the steering wheel on the opposite side. Her attempts at drawing a face resembled those of a middle-schooler who watched too much anime.

And now her hand began to cramp.

She threw the sketchbook on the ground and googled: “When does the human brain stop growing?”

Twenty-five, apparently.

That night, she dreamt that she was in high school again. During lunch, an active shooter broke in and started gunning down the students. Screams and gunfire pierced through the air. Soon, most of her classmates lay dead, covered in bullet holes, bleeding all across the marble floor.

The gunman, at first, was just some guy. A student, maybe. But then he suddenly morphed into Aubree's dad. His face was red with fury, and a vein pulsating on his temple. But he was also sobbing. Aubree cried too, and screamed at him to stop. But then he started shooting at her, and said he wouldn't stop until she was dead. While he fired, she hid underneath the lunch table, before escaping into the hallway. But the bullets now flew in her direction. She ran and ran, dodging the bullets, until one struck her in the leg. She fell, and then her dad—

Aubree woke up, drenched in sweat. It was two in the morning.

"I'd like to walk around in your mind someday

I'd like to walk all over the things you say to me."

She was singing one of her mother's favorite songs as she walked.

The summer drought had dried up the riverbank. Aubree saw a couple dead frogs there; flies had already swarmed their bloated corpses. Crossing the bridge, she gazed down at the pond, at the patch of golden lily pads, upon which those frogs had surely seen better days. The lily pads drifted along together from a gentle breeze, leaving behind a trail of soft, caressing ripples. A moment later, a tampon sailed by and broke apart the patch.

“I would disturb your easy tranquility

I'd turn away the sad impossibility of your smile”

She found herself back at work later that afternoon.

"Hey Aubree. How's it going?" Mike said.

Aubree shrugged. "Alright, I guess. How about you?"

Mike smirked. "Oh, I think you know how I am." He raised his fist in the air and cheered: "I wanna fucking die!" Then he snickered, waiting for Aubree to smile back.

"Why do you always say that?" Aubree said.

Mike's eyes widened, but he still smirked. "Huh?"

"Why do you always say you wanna die?"

He cleared his throat, and his smile dwindled a little. "You know I'm not serious about that. It's just my twisted sense of humor. That's all."

"Yeah. I had a feeling it was that." A guy from across the store sneezed, and Aubree jumped a little.

"I won't make that joke again, if it's making you uncomfortable," Mike said.

"No, no, it's not. I guess it's not. I'm just curious, you know."

Mike cleared his throat again. "Well, I wanna make it clear that I'm not actually suicidal, alright?" Aubree nodded. "I guess," Mike said, "it's really easy to be nihilistic these days. Politicians are at each other's throats, climate change is fucking up the planet. Stuff like that. Oh, and our jobs suck. I can't stand being here forty hours a week. It's driving me nuts. All the customers barking at me, the paperwork, standing around and wasting my life away. I don't have to tell you how depressing it is. And it's not just us; it's the whole fucking world. I learned the other day that sixty percent of all jobs in this country are totally pointless. They're made up by corporations just so we have busy work to do. It's messed up, and I hate it. So, like, I don’t wanna kill myself. But if humanity just got totally obliterated by a meteor tomorrow, I don’t think that would be such a bad thing. Do you get what I'm saying?"

He looked really sweaty all of a sudden.

"Yeah, I guess I do," Aubree said.

"Sorry." Mike scratched his beard. "I didn't mean to go on such a depressing rant."

"It's alright. I get it."

The guy sneezed again. Aubree jumped like last time.

The whole rest of the day was slow. Barely any customers. Through the window, Aubree watched the sun set.

Before she knew it, her shift was over. She drove past the steel factory again. Because of the setting sun, the clouds behind the factory looked like a giant inferno. The middle-aged woman sat on the company bench again, crying her eyes out.