"How are we going to get out of this town?" Sleep filled Maple's voice. Her head lay in Staton's lap; slowly his fingers laced every red strand cascading down his thigh. A shallow sigh and a couple breaths later she sat up sitting on his lap leaning...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
"Okay, here is how you do this." The girl bends over grabbing a case off of the red wheeled device that I think she called a 'u-boat'. My mind was trying to focus as she grabbed an item from the bag and started searching the shelf for it.
"Anything on this u-boat-' Oh thank god I remembered at least one thing correctly 'will be on this aisle. You see here it says aisle six and fun fact that is where we are. We need to check all of these items and make sure they aren't empty on the shelf. If we can put them out we need to. Our goal is to get as many things off of this cart without overfilling the shelf or making new rows. We need to know what we are out of so we can order it, does that all make sense?"
I nod at her, but I'm sure I look like a deer trapped in headlights. How was I supposed to figure out where everything was?
"Everyday you will be assigned a u-boat and it will be your job to work it, once you get better you will get more than one assigned to you, and so on and so forth. Eventually they may let you start doing the ordering, but you don't need to worry about that right now. It's pretty self explanatory." She was nice, the longer she talked the more I felt like I could possibly manage this job.
She grabbed a case and handed it to me, before pointing in the general direction of where it was located. I began searching the shelves like a mad woman trying to find the exact brand of beans I held in my hand. Why have I never noticed how many brands there are? Then you have to take into account the low sodium, high sodium, loaded, unloaded, and god knows what else these cans could possibly say.
"It gets easier after a while," She smiled again, and I cursed myself mentally for not paying enough attention to catch her name. I searched her apron looking for some sort of name tag that would help me identify her. There was nothing.
"How long have you been doing this?" I question, feeling some sense of accomplishment once I finally found the right row, only to be disappointed that it was already full and there was nothing else that could be added. I put the case back on the u-boat, grabbing another one and turning back to the shelves. This felt like it would take forever.
"I've been here for a few months. I really love this kind of job, something about finding where everything goes and placing it on the shelf really makes me happy!" She was beaming with joy as she emptied yet another box.
A customer comes down the aisle looking at our boxes as if they were ruining her day. The girl quickly grabs them before apologizing to the customer.
"We need to keep the aisle looking clean and make sure we don't get in the way of any customers. This is why the four am shift is my favorite. You get here hours before the store even opens and you can make as big of a mess as you would like." She laughed, grabbing another box and going directly to where it goes on the shelf.
"I'm sorry, this is all so much and I seem to have forgotten your name," I felt awful asking, but she was such a sweet girl that it was eating at me not knowing. At least not being smart enough to remember.