Chelsea Keen
The Cashier
The Winner of the 2020 Roberta Lee Brooker Fiction Writing Prize
The only kind of real human contact she got everyday was when her hand brushed against a customer’s as she placed their change into their hand and told them to have a nice day. Around the first week of her job at the small convenience store, there was a young woman around her age who couldn’t stop talking about her trip to Greece. She had purchased bags full of little carry on things for her trip. The woman laughed nervously about it, running her fingers through her dark locks before getting stuck, realizing she had her hair pulled back into a lazy clip. She had admitted rather bashfully that she might have waited until the last minute to get what she needed at the store. The cashier chuckled and said she understood, that she’s been in her shoes before when she went to Florida for the first time. The woman grinned and started talking about Greece again; the food, the plane ride there, the weather. Feeling a fluttering in her gut, she told the woman about the weather in Florida, about how she had been there recently to visit her mother. “Are you going to visit her again next year?” The woman asked, helping her bag her items even though she’s not the cashier. The said cashier didn’t pause in her movements, but the question made her eyes sag to her hands as she rang up the woman’s luggage tags. She said no, she wouldn’t be going next year. The woman left too quickly, taking with her her conversation of passports, planes, and travel. The next customer took her place and the world faded back to scanning items and asking for coupons. When she got home after work, she quickly changed into something comfortable, something without zippers and buttons, and waited for a guy she had met online to pick her up in a nice-looking car she’s only ever seen in commercials. They went back to his place and she was glad she didn’t wear any buttons because it’s faster when she took her clothes off. Later, the man fell asleep cuddling her with each hand on her breasts and she let herself enjoy his heat for a few more minutes before forcing herself to get up. She never left right away, sometimes she sat on the bed and looked around the bedroom she’s in, taking in every detail she could to try to figure out who she had slept with really was. This time she watched a movie she had been wanting to see on his Netflix account with one of his dogs laying in her lap. When the movie ended, instead of watching another one, she turned off the TV and headed out. She had work in the morning.
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Etchings
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