It was supposed to be just a regular day in Walmart. He would put on his uniform, the blue shirt with a yellow sun and the hazelnut-creamy trousers, brush his teeth, and set off to his most favorite shopping place in the world where he would both go shopping and work. It all went well for quite some time. He chatted with customers, explaining to them which hair dryer was better and way, advising to better buy the organic milk than the GMO milk that is full with extra poison put in the cow feed, and circling around the greengrocer’s stands to help the customers choose and weigh their veggies. No one asked him anything about beekeeping or honey, but he always tried to put some biology into groceries and food.

It gave him the necessary fuel to push through the day. Any day. Every day. For two years. Then this day happened. He had just helped a lady to pick between two inflatable pools that were on sale when the manager told him to help arrange the grapefruits at the greengrocer’s section. He immediately went on to do the job. During the-so-interesting exhibition and rearranging of the grapefruits, he had a vision. Everything around him froze. People, pineapples, coconuts. Even bananas stopped going bad, which happens like never.

If you looked at him from the point of view of the other shoppers, he would be in a blurry, dazzled state for only three seconds, but to him, it seemed like a lot more. At first, everything around him seemed too bright. Nothing could be discerned. Slowly, the picture before his eyes started clearing up, and he saw a big wooden door. Oak, it seemed. For a split of a second, he thought about what it would be like if the door would be of pineapple wood, but then he realized that pineapples don’t have a wooden stem. They are like an extraordinarily beautiful aloe vera with a lumpish fruit in the middle. People gotta love it. Anyway, in the vision, he was opening the door, and, somehow, he was pushed towards by someone or something so he took her along while falling down.

At the moment when he fell, he woke up from the vision and was brought back to reality. Everything felt crazy and uneven inside him, but he had to continue working and pretending like nothing was affecting him. So the work continued, and he kept being engaged in life-or-death decisions when buying some trifles in Walmart were in question. He went back home, took a nice warm shower, and prepared two sandwiches from a piece of an octopus he had bought earlier. That was his first octopus, and he cursed like hell for not having chosen salmon instead of the chewy old marine tentacle. But life continued flowing just as usual, not stopping for anybody’s ventilation of frustration, and he went to bed at 10 pm. In the morning, he felt odd concerning the unpleasantries from yesterday, and it was so puzzling how such a thing could have happened to him. I mean, visions?

Not an everyday commodity that everyone hopes for. But what to do, it just happens sometimes, he thought.

Well, the work was waiting as usual, at 10 am. Put on the uniform, willingly refuse to spray a perfume as a sign of protest against the cruel, slavish, capitalistic system that exploits young, whenever-I-want-I-can-fart talents, and head on to the greatest job of all times. Entering the shop and working in it for a quarter of an hour, an impediment occurred. He was summoned by his superior to come to the manager’s office. There he got the sack like it was nothing.

And I thought the pigeon shitting me was supposed to bring luck. If I’m not the luckiest man alive, I don’t know who is!

When he asked why he was fired, the manager told him he’d been reported by a customer to have ignored him when he asked him something.

“The customer said you were staring blankly into space with a grapefruit in your hand, Max.” the manager said. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but you can’t provide the best customer service anymore. I’m sorry,” he added.

So that was it for our ex-Walmart worker. One little mistake, one very short period of absentmindedness, and you’re made redundant. Apparently, he wasn’t enough, not sufficient, not an appropriate exploitative cog for the well-oiled machinery of capitalism.

Ah… You just have to keep your chin up, I guess… It’s not the end of the world.

And there he was. Home at 11 am. That hadn’t happened in a long time. He had a long shower. To the length of it mostly attributed a long contemplation what to do.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

And there wasn’t really much to do except keep on living. And about the money problem... He decided to look for a job online. There was this application for finding jobs online – UwannaWorko? – and, after browsing through it for a few minutes, he found something that seemed moderately okay. Categorization of books in a public library. That seemed doable.

I can do it. How hard can it be?

He was lying on his bed when he applied for the job offer. And he was accepted in a few hours. Just like that. He was supposed to go working at 9 am tomorrow.

This seems incredibly refreshing. I just got fired and now I’m off to go to another place to work. Everything is good in the world.

Or so he thought. After an amazing dinner of turkey in soya sauce with too much rice (if there is such a thing), he went for a fresh evening walk. After all, being July, it was ideal to go outside after the sun went down. The sun would set at about 8, and he was now on the streets around 7.30. He thought the area would be more buzzing with activity, but it was somehow pleasantly tranquil. The Linden Avenue was sparkling with the hot summer spirit slowly blazing in every leaf high in the crowns of the linden trees.

The leaves would accumulate the daily heat, and then they would be slowly releasing it throughout the night so that in the morning you would still feel the freshly cooked vapor of the previous scorching day. The pavement felt nice and comfortable to walk on. There wasn’t trash anywhere. Except in the trashcans, of course, neatly put at every walking mile. He was passing by a beautiful set of three tennis courts, thinking how it would be nice to play tennis from time to time, for a change. He had never played it, and he wanted to do it as long as he could remember.

It’s just never been the right time, I suppose.

Walking like that in a leisurely manner for some time, he noticed something odd. In front of him was a felled trashcan with garbage spilled out of it all over the pavement. There were some deranged-looking Coca-Cola cans, a few rotten cabbage heads, a couple of torn dirty magazines, and so many cigarette butts of different colors and sizes. He just neatly hopped over that nasty pile, and kept on walking as if he hadn’t a care in this world. For some strange reason, he imagine how it would be if the surrounding linden trees had cigarette ends instead of leaves.

It would be much stinkier than it is right now, that’s for sure hahah.

He walked a bit more and returned home. After brushing his teeth, he jumped into his bed.

Tomorrow is a new day. Let’s start it fresh and clean. New day – new me.

He set the alarm for 7.30 and left his phone on the bedside table.

Books. Shelves. Reading tables. Silence. It seems nice. Fine by me.

It was easy enough to fall asleep. 2 hours passed and he found himself in the state of sleep paralysis. At least he thought that was the case because he had never experienced such a thing before. Only some of his friends mentioned it to him. Supposedly, you are unable to move a muscle while your eyes stay open. It is a battle between the mind and the body. Able to think but unable to move. A chaotic state of mindless turbulence. Well, he had the sensation similar to that. Only, besides being awake and not moving at all, he heard something, too.

A sort of scratching on the floor. Like claws being dragged over wooden planks. Then, after a few seconds, there was the sound of quick thumping of feet like someone was dashing to him. And he felt a shaking of the mattress. Somebody was on his bed with him, but he couldn’t see who or what. He felt a warm touch along his left ankle. It slowly went caressing him along the inner side of his leg, all the way to his groins. He felt long sharp nails when it pulled down his pajamas together with his underwear. On the pulling down of his underpants, his swollen cock catapulted to the upright position. Shortly afterwards, he felt the soft, wet, and warm feeling of the sexual heaven.

Two light but flabby and fleshy cushions went slowly up and down in a constant rhythm. A vein on each side of his forehead was relaxingly throbbing with every hop, each time delivering a dose of serotonin, dopamine, endorphin, and oxytocin to the every cell in his body. It was all one big whirlpool of happy hormones, racing and chasing each other through the bloodstream. It lasted about 4 minutes. Then he had an orgasm and released a part of his juvenile, energetic, and relentless spirit into this inexplicable someone or something. He then felt his pajamas being pulled up. He was confused but happy. Everything seemed perfectly placed and orchestrated in the world. He never saw the mysterious someone who rode him that night, only part of its long serrated tail with a hairy arrow at its end had briefly flashed to his eyes.

He woke up around 3 am with sticky and damp boxer briefs. He tried to remember what he had dreamed, but he couldn’t, the dream had dissipated like dust carried away by the wind. He tried to fall asleep again, but some shadows on the walls were constantly dancing in front of him. He opened his eyes and saw them clearly, quite aware that what he was now seeing wasn’t a dream.