The Difference of the Future

Chapter 1

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.