Eve worked in a large shopping mart. Every single morning, when the sun was still a pinkish haze through the pollution -she drove the short route through the concrete maze and parked in front of the neon-flashing chaos that was the liquor store. With the click of worn, cheap shoes she strode over the vast parking lot and around to the back of the mart, where it smelled rotten and fishy. The following bit she never remembered, because she was usually too tired. But before she knew it she was seated beneath the penetrating ceiling lights of Shop Smart Super Mart, bipping groceries past the cashier and watching people fumble for their wallets.
In addition to getting half an hour for lunch, five minutes for smokes and special offers on Shop Smart Super Mart’s own brand products (like the “Smart Shopping Super Easy Chicken Pastry Pasties 0.79$” and such) – she also got to wear their striped, red uniform. And she had been particularly lucky to get one that was at least two sizes too big, and a little stiff. So when she sat down by the cashier it looked like she was wearing a striped, red tent with “It Makes Sense to Be Smart - Choose Super Mart™” printed on the back.
At least her co-workers weren’t too bad. She even had a friend of sorts, she was named Ty – it was an abbreviation for something, but to be honest she had forgotten what for. And seeing they had worked together for three years – it just didn’t seem appropriate to ask her now. Ty mostly ate frozen peas. Not in their frozen state, but cooked or stewed or fried or anything. She never had a meal without spicing it up with frozen peas. It gave her a greenish tint. Or maybe it was the lighting at Shop Smart Super Mart. But either way, it made Ty look like a giant asparagus. She even had that odd bend in her neck, and had short, fuzzy hair. It all made sense. That’s if asparaguses wore striped, red shirts and red trousers.
A beard with a man was trying to pay for a load of peanuts. Unlike all the other workers at Shop Smart Super Mart – Eve had never stopped trying to figure out why on earth people would buy ten lbs of Goldenhill Farms Roasted Round Peanuts for 0.69$ per lb, or why someone would insist on paying the appropriate sum of 6,90$, in cents. The beard was 26 cents short, and she found that she simply chipped him in from her breast pocket, without blinking. Let him have his damn peanuts. Her pay was so bad that those 26 cents really wouldn’t make any difference anyway. She was still going to eat Smart Shopping Super Easy Chicken Pastry Pasties for dinner tonight as well. Or maybe she was having just one, and she could drink some Super Easy Juice. It tasted just like flying.
Before going out for her fifth smoke that morning she passed Otto by the dairy section, he was crying again. His limp shoulders were heaving for oxygen as he couldn’t breathe properly between the sobs. He looked up to see her looking at him, she pointed at the packet of Super Easy Nicotine Explosion in her other hand. Without a word he followed her outside, she lit them both in silence, trailed off to different thoughts. Otto’s eyes bore a red edge, and he inhaled so deeply the curly spark on the end blazed. She decided not to rip it up again, they had been over it so many times, and she could tell by his face that he couldn’t sleep at night. Again.
And that was when she crossed the street by the Fancy Nails Salon. Eve didn’t react fast enough, because Otto had already seen her. His eyes refilled with tears, it looked like walls of glass protruding from beneath his eyelid. And she had the guts to come anywhere near Shop Smart Super Mart. Eve pulled the now frighteningly short stump out of his mouth, dropped hers too to the ground and rubbed them into the concrete. She took a hold of his stiff, striped shirt and dragged him inside to the break room and pushed him down into a chair. Eve then loaded a box of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream marked with a post-it saying “EMERGENCIES ONLY” on it out of the freezer. She didn’t have the guts to sort this out right now. She couldn’t look into Otto’s bloodshot eyes for a second longer. Before hurling out the door she tossed Otto a spoon and pushed the ice cream across the linoleum table. The spoon hit him straight in the face, but he didn’t budge.
When walking away from the Super Smart Shopping Mart it was just like sounds slipped back into focus again, because all you could hear when standing outside the backdoor while having a smoke was the shadowy, mellow “Whirrrrrrh” of the air shafts shooting the sweet, locked up scents of SSSMart out over the small stock-delivery area. Eve was rolling up her sleeves menacingly as she stampeded across the street and past the Fancy Nails Salon, that -even though she had no intentions of kicking the shit out of the woman. With a small, sharp fist on the end of a sticky wrist - Eve grasped a hold of Jill’s collar and shoved her into the walls of Cooke’s Drug Megastore. For a split second Jill looked terrified, then Eve let her go and looked her up and down furiously.
“How DARE you fecking come here now?!”
- “W-what? Eve? – Come he- It’s been nine bloody months! Get off my back, will you?” Jill retorted, looking offended.
“Isn’t this city big enough for both of us? Nine months!” she continued harshly.
- “You KNOW that doesn’t make any difference. Feck it, Jill. He ain’t letting you go, aight? So just get your shopping done in some other street – is it so fecking difficult, is it? Holy fecking shit, Jill. You’re killing him, eh? Couldn’t you at least show some decency in doin’ it by staying the feck away. It just fecking gets to me, aight. It pisses me off”.
Eve didn’t even know why she defended Otto, it had to be the way he tried to hide how depressed he was all the time. But then, it wasn’t working the least bit. He was, facing it – totally useless at hiding it. So bad you could almost suspect he wasn’t trying to hide it. But she knew he was, and she knew she didn’t want to see him hurt any longer. His sadness was as pointless as everything else at the SSSMart. She couldn’t remember the last time she had smiled, either.
Mr. Cubeleck – her boss, was putting the Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream away when Eve re-entered the break room. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes with long, worn fingers. She noticed he was in his very best tie.
“Ehm. How is he?” Eve asked.
- “I sent him home.” Mr. Cubeleck replied.
“Yeah. Em. Thanks, I’ll- I’ll take his shift or, - something”. She said, and couldn’t leave the break room fast enough. To get back in to the shop one had to walk through the cool, packed stockroom that was filled with groceries of all shapes and sizes. Eve stopped to catch her breath and straighten her face. He had been wearing his very best tie. He had even been trying to hide it.
Suddenly Ty came rushing through the stockroom, she had makeup on. Her long, weary face looked even more like something out of a different dimension now. Eve pretended not to notice, but Ty had already stopped in front of her with an apologetic look on her face. But before Ty had time to speak, Eve had raised her hand to silence her.
“Look. ‘Key. It REALLY doesn’t matter. Have fun, Ty.”
And while trying not to get eye contact with her, Eve left the stockroom.
The sun was setting in an array of golden bronze between the green and orange cars. From through the glass exterior of SSSMart, Eve at the cashier could see how the golden brassiness of sunlight licked its way over the parked station wagons, over the shopping carts, over the working mothers with their nagging children and over the loaded plastic bags. An old man was buying some more soap, some more Quick It Clean Super Wash for 0.39$ a bar. That was the third time he was in this week. His hands were wrinkly and bright red, like someone had been scrubbing at them for hours. Eve wondered what he needed all that soap for, and if she could legally deny to sell him any more soap, just like a bartender could make an assessment that he’d had enough. Mr. Cubeleck was crossing the parking lot together with Ty. She let the man have the soap, it wasn’t any of her business.
Someone had once done the strangest thing to the parking lot outside the SSSMart, Liquor Store and Imogene’s Pets & Fish. Dark scars in the asphalt marked where a positive soul had once in a desperate attempt to brighten the place - planted trees in a straight row across the lot. It had been done in the hope that some trees maybe could shade the cars on hot days, or provide with some fresh air and perhaps even add some green charm to the utterly charmless stretch of p lots. They had died within a few months, one couldn’t safely say why though. Trees can thrive almost anywhere.
An old woman once walked up to Eve while she was stacking milk cartons in the dairy section, and talked about the trees. The old woman had said that those trees were rare and that they had no business at a parking lot – they should’ve been in a lovely garden somewhere, to be taken care of. Eve had said that it was exactly the same with everyone else. Nobody had any business in a parking lot. Wouldn’t it be nice to be in a lovely garden somewhere, and be taken care of?
Tyla. That was her name, Eve suddenly recalled. Her name was Tyla. It was only four letters, why would someone bother to shorten four letters down to two? It didn’t make much difference. Eve was smoking out her car window, waiting for the light to go green. It was chilly, her stereo was playing some depressing tune that she liked a lot. She studied one of her tattoos intently, it was of some peach tree blossoms crawling up from her elbow and twirling around her wrist. The light flashed green, the traffic swished beside her as she stepped on it and geared on in to the night. Eve’s flashy stereo was probably the only thing she owned that actually mattered to her. Well she did have the fish tank with all the fish in it, Uncle Thomas, Auntie Gertrude, Miss Maple, Little Rudy and Uncle Albert. But they were all fish, they didn’t even know Eve from the next human. She knew them though. Maybe that’s what mattered.
When Eve was leaving her rusty, steel blue Desoto (with those appealing tail fins) she was as always carrying her heavy baseball bat. It wasn’t that her neighbourhood was all that dodgy, it was just that it looked dodgy – and that to a human, could be enough to get into that mindset. So she took her bat with her, and locked herself in to the shady apartment block. The elevator was rickety, but she was never bothered to take the stairs, they had once sorted out an agreement, but it was usually never washed anyway. At least she never did it. Eve’s apartment was in the block of Guemanns Ave. and 47th Street 59b, apartment 119a. That was the eighth floor, top floor, door to the left. One of the wonderful things about her home at Guemanns Ave. was that it had once been the office of a software engineering company called Walrick Solutions. It had Walrick Solutions slogans visible underneath the paint everywhere. Like in the fourth floor it said “Every problem was meant to be solve...” then the rest disappeared behind someone’s fridge. Not that those slogans were so wonderful, but the architecture of the place had provided everyone with apartments in quite decent sizes. Eve’s Apartment, number 119a had incidentally been the office of the head engineer or whatever one would call the man that was probably the only one in Walrick Solutions that had had any charisma. This meant that her apartment was a little smaller than the others, and with an odd shape. It had though one giant round window on one wall. It made the building look totally crazy from the outside, but provided Eve with an extraordinary view over the sparkling city. The big, round window looked so weird from the outside – most people called the building “The Eye”.
The reason everything had changed so much was that Eve had fallen in love with her teacher. They all called him just “Mister C.” He had sideburns and a contagious laugh – and was probably also the only one who was ever able to teach Eve anything. She’d been only sixteen when she started in Mister C’s history class. She had got in to the school despite it having a maxed Asian quota. Her mother had talked Eve in as being British, because Eve was practically a Brit. She had lived there all her life. It was just that her family had noticeably migrated from Sinuiju, North Korea to northern England a generation back – before spending their very last money to move to Memphis. They had moved to Tennessee for a fresh start.
To be fair, it hadn’t been a fresh start at all. It had been a horrible start. Eve’s brother and father worked around the clock at a laundry service, Eve’s mother worked in a Thai restaurant. It was only Eve that was allowed an education. Her brother Ha-Neul never even got the chance because he was a good worker and not a fast learner- he was good at those repetitive, vegetative tasks. Back in England their family could afford to send them both to school. But in Memphis, Ha-Neul had to work. It had been very different in England, in many ways it had been a good place for them to grow up. Eve’s parents thrived in their little business, the dingy corner shop that sold imported groceries. But Eve’s mother’s brother had other plans for their family. He had set up a very successful Laundry service in Memphis (at least so it was, according to his letters), but the truth was that he whitewashed money for the mob. When Eve’s family sold everything to start over in her uncle’s successful business in Memphis – they arrived to the surprise of finding him in shackles, shot. Her father and brother continued working at the laundry, but the mob wouldn’t trust them to whitewash any money for them anymore. They buried Eve’s uncle behind their house, underneath the unkempt, greyish shrubbery.
Mister C Had a lot of desirable features. For one he was very wise, he knew lots of things – and he never stopped teaching everyone the things he knew. She had been so scared those years, everybody talked differently than from back home in Chester, which meant that she spoke differently than all the other students. They made sure to remind her of that as often as possible – so she never had the time to forget how different she was. And as far as she could recall, Mister C never really did much to prevent them. But that didn’t matter, he wouldn’t have been able to – even if he had tried. They would always have found a way to get at her, especially if she had been the teacher’s pet.
It was at random how they met outside of class one Thursday night. For some odd reason Eve found him crying on a bench outside Ramses Shadow Ink Tattoos, by the bus stop. Eve made a little money from letting the young tattooist Otis, using her as a test subject, and tattooing away at her milky skin. It was a desperate measure, and her mother hated it. But it was still money, and her father accepted them when Eve’s mother wasn’t looking. Because they direly needed it, they had a rent to pay.
Mister C was staring out in front of him with blank, runny eyes, and he didn’t recognise her at all as she sat down on the bench beside him, arms all plastered up in cotton and tape to heal Otis’ fresh works. For some reason she felt like helping, because she recognised him immediately. And it didn’t make much sense to her that the only person in the world she looked up to – and was happy every time she saw him, now sat here and cried his heart out. It disturbed the balance of things. So without thinking she touched his arm, and he – definitely without thinking, wrapped his arms around her, squeezed and continued to sniff and sob. They sat like that, cars sporadically bumping past with tasteless stereos, and the growl and orange glow of the city their only company. When the bus eventually stopped in front of them with a relieving “Pschhhh”, he let go, and she took his hand and led him aboard. And they sat on 77 West Memphis-Local in the odd, kind of light yellow light from the clinically ugly ceiling with all the insects in it. And her arms were throbbing and aching, and his face swollen and unrecognisable, and they sat there and didn’t have anything to say or do. So when he went off at Balfour, they waved to each other as the bus took off again. He from the outside, her from the inside – and that was all there was to it.
Mister C recognised her the next day, when he was once again in character as the charming, appealing and happy teacher – presenting history like it actually made a difference to anything. At first they both pretended like nothing had ever happened, but the day after that again Mister C held Eve back after class. And he looked her in the eyes and he looked important, and she got worried that maybe she had done something wrong. But all he said was
“Thank you, Eve.” And then with a motion of a hand, told her to go after the others. And she did.
It was odd how it developed over the next weeks, they passed the classes by occasionally, and unnoticeably sending each other looks – and later Eve thought it might have been longing. So he sat there and waited for her outside Ramses Shadow Ink Tattoo one Thursday night, completely without warning. And she had tape and cotton all over her left ankle, and she sat down next to him like they had some weeks before. And still they couldn’t think of anything to say to each other. Mister C looked lost, like he couldn’t find the right amount of breath to have in his lungs to speak. But his face gave off that it he was attempting to explain his utterly strange behaviour. Without thinking he suddenly blurted it all out. How he had seen his girlfriend walking out of the Woman’s Care Clinic from across the street. That she had worn such a stern face. And that he had noticed how her cheeks had hollowed the following weeks. And that she hadn’t told him about any of it, but then suddenly yelled it out during an argument and told him that she had killed his unborn child, and that she did it because she couldn’t see a future for them together.
Eve looked at him the entire time while he spoke. He looked bewildered, tried to get himself together. Then apologized
–“I- I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to load all of this on to you, but it’s just, I used to talk to her about things like this, but now she is the one I need to talk about, so I can’t. I feel lost. I- I – oh, sorry.”
-“Don’t mention it.” Eve said quietly. The street was noisy even this late, the cars swishing by – but he could hear her so clearly, it seemed almost unnatural. Eve reached out to touch his arm, it had worked the last time, she just wanted him to hold her in his arms again. She wanted it badly. But he didn’t hug her, he did something worse – he took her hand into his and pressed it softly. Then he started crying again. It was worse this time. She whispered “I am so sorry too. I am sorry about your baby.” but in recollection she don’t think he ever heard that.
They continued to meet casually like that, outside Ramses Shadow Ink Tattoo. And he told her stories about his unborn child – how it would’ve been. Eve told him how her life was, her dead uncle, the bullying, her desperate mother, her brother that had to work every hour of the day. Her short comments always made Mister C knock his worries into perspective, seeing he could at least expect to find himself with a home every night after school – unlike Eve. Her life was as unbalanced and unpredictable as it could be. Mister C was just about the only one who held it in place – him, and probably Otis and his cotton and tape, ink and cigarettes. These Thursday nights got them both into smoking, it gave them a sense of purpose while sitting there underneath the lamp post. They could pretend they met up for some other reason than for the fact that they wanted to be there, together, every minute the entire rest of the week. They met to have a smoke, right?
-“How much’re these?” a girl chewed. Pinkish bubble gum bobbed inside her half open jaw.
-“25 cents each” Eve said automatically. The girl grabbed a handful and dropped them all on the little tray placed above the cashier.
It was a truly odd sensation, because Eve couldn’t remember having dinner or feeding Uncle Thomas, or brushing her teeth in the rusty sink. She couldn’t remember falling asleep to the comforting bubbles of the fish tank with a cigarette still glowing in the ashtray by the window. But still she knew it had happened, and she couldn’t help but jotting those details in to her memory so that she didn’t have to worry that parts of the day kept getting wiped out all the time. She couldn’t even remember getting in that morning. Though maybe she remembered what she had listened to on her way to work, some song. It felt familiar. On the other hand, she couldn’t be too sure.
Ty was sitting in the cashier opposite of her. She kept smiling kind of half worriedly to Eve every now and then, but Eve pretended like it didn’t happen. It was frustrating how she was so eager to get Eve’s “blessing”, or – what did she want her to say exactly? What did she want? She usually kept out of other people’s business, why did Ty and Mr. Cubeleck have to be any of Eve’s concern at all? Let them have their damn excursions to the cinema. It didn’t make any difference to her what they did to fill their spare time. It made a difference to SSSMart, that was for sure, it brightened the place up a little. Just a little bit.
At lunch break Eve sat on the huge recycle bin outside the break room and smoked another Nicotine Explosion while watching a hobo trying to cross the street without losing all his possessions out of his SSSMart trolley. Eve had even seen him steal it from the little discoloured shed on the parking lot, but hadn’t done anything about it. Let him have his damn trolley. What difference does it make?
Ty came out from the break room, she had a bowl of Laurel Meadow’s Delicious Home Grown Frozen Organic Green Peas ($1.98) ready for the microwave in her hand.
- “How are you?” Ty said.
-“Bony, tattooed, dark haired, still consisting of 80% cigarette ashes” Eve said.
-“Better than being 80% frozen peas” Ty replied with a sad undertone
“Eugh, I’m so sick of them. I would’ve stopped eating them ages ago if it wasn’t for my condition, you know”.
Yeah, that’s right. Tyla actually believed her nails would fall off if she stopped eating peas. It was some lie her parents had told her to make her eat her greens, but then they had forgotten to tell her it was a lie. Or maybe Ty’s parents own parents had told them the same – and now they all believed it was true. Either way, Ty got damn serious about it. Sometimes Eve caught her attempting to stick Ultra Hold Extra Strong Superglue ($1.90) underneath her nails. But frozen peas were just about as sweet and flavourless as a vegetable could get – so hating every other green, Ty had no choice but to stick to the peas. Unless she wanted to be without nails, of course.
Something was up in aisle seven. Two boys were licking the sugar off all the Everlasting Sweet n’ Crunchy Sticky Strawberry Lozenges. Eve sneaked up on them and suddenly appeared in front of them from behind the Butter Popcorn Toffee Lollipop stand. The youngest boy gave a little shriek out of sheer surprise. To Eve’s astonishment they didn’t attempt to run away from her. From the look of the older one, he knew it would only make matters worse. In desperate self defence he nudged the younger one – and with staggering speed they produced a little stream of salty tears each. Eve ignored them and got them to gather all the “used” lozenges in a little cup. Then she made them stack all the butter into the shelf in the dairy section while surveying them closely. At first they made no effort at it, but after a while they started to measure the space in-between the margarine and the butter to make sure they were stacked neatly enough. When they had finished the youngest (whose name was Philip the Freckle (that was at least what he had introduced himself as)) asked Eve in a real pleading tone if they could come back and stack the butter some other time. She let them have the cup with the half-eaten lozenges and said that this was their pay in advance if they could come back next week to help her with the soup shelf. Philip the Freckle lit up like a little beacon, even Scamp, the oldest, brightened to this idea. On their way out of SSSMart, Eve overheard him saying how all of this had been his idea, and that he had let them be caught on purpose. Philips eyes were widening in admiration as his little voice trailed off.
Mister C’s girlfriend moved out some weeks later, and it was a sigh of relief. It was like both Mister C and Eve could exhale properly again. They had met up ever so more often those weeks, talking shit, talking seriously, sitting together in silence, smoking. One night she had fresh tattoos done, as usual on late Thursdays– and he looked so calmed and mild that night. So free. She tried to catch his eyes, and for a while he didn’t notice, but then he turned to face her – and they sat with their eyes locked for a moment. He looked so comforted and tranquil so when she leant over to embrace him – she didn’t expect him to kiss her. But he did. It was a soft peck, it made her body jolt, but she kissed him back. Because when they were as close as that, she realised that that was what she had wanted all along. He was a good kisser, she thought, or – she wasn’t sure. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t make any difference.
-“We can’t tell anyone”. He said blankly as they were sitting on the bus home.
-“I won’t tell, who would I tell? Nobody cares what I do” Eve replied.
-“I would lose my job, you know, if somebody finds out”.
-“I know”. She said, and she really did.
