The Deli Man-Short Story
Okay nothing fancy here, this is just a short and quick story about your local grocery store deli man. The deli man wakes up in his bed before the sun is even out. His alarm clocked is a red haze of numbers that slowly come into focus and of course he is already running 15 minutes late. He rushes to get showered and ready for a day of work he could do without. He looks at himself in the mirror and contemplates calling in sick for the day, which he subconsciously does everyday without really thinking about it.
He drives to work through his crappy neighborhood full of crappy people of whom he could deal without. He fights traffic full of annoying drivers who are so much in a hurry to get nowhere. They have nothing to do, they don't even have to work that day or at all. Deli Man grits his teeth and drives on to the parking lot of his job.
While trying to cross the parking lot to his place of employment he is nearly struck by three or more cars each day. Drivers zoom past or in front of him like he isn't even there, sometimes he will get the blare of their horn or the vision of their middle finger, the same customers he will be serving with a smile he is forced to have just minutes from now.
He needs to use the bathroom but of course someone beats him there and slams the door shut so he waits. He eyes his ever-ticking and relentless wristwatch. Time does not stop for him...his time is nearly out. He instead punches into the time clock where certain individuals lurk above like vulchers waiting for him to try and commit time clock fraud and get him fired...there are always those watching his every move, waiting for him to make a mistake. These are the people he works for and with so far.
On his way to the deli other store employees will either say hi to him or pretend he is not there, most will pretend to be preoccupied and not see him, while others will blatantly ignore him as they act better than him. The Deli Man does not care and pursues on. He dares to take a bottle of drinking water into his department for he gets thirsty, only to have it seized and thrown away by the department manager. So now he is without being treated humanely and he is without water. A great day surely to come and he hasn't even been there three minutes yet. He glances at his wrist watch and strangely the time that was flying by while he was running late, now seems to have slowed to a crawl. He curses under his breath.
He sees three of his co-workers in his department for the day he will work with. He gauges how his day will go based upon this and according to his calculations it will not go very well. A sick feeling in his stomach.
He washes his hands and secretly despises his co-workers, most of them make him sick. There are about three of them that he does not mind so much however. He sees customers already on the counter, some of them are already waving there arms at him frantically as is they have been waiting in line since the Ice Age, even though they have barely been there around thirty eight seconds or so. He flashes a cool smile pretending that the ignorant morons don't bother him, but they do.
His name is Steve but a fat bald regular customer says, "Hey what's up Stevie?" This annoys him to no other. My name is Steve you fat bald fucker. He wanted to slap the fat bald man right on top of his ridiculous melon skull. Instead he greeted the man politely offering the most authentic smile he could muster, that's what you had to do when you where a psychopath and wanted to blend in.
Steve hated the pretentious, arrogant, and the self important people who thought they were better than anyone else. He had his .45 handgun in his bag, which was in the backroom of the deli. He brought the gun with him everyday but had not used it so far. Should he? He pushed the thought into the very back of his mind for the moment like he did almost everyday.
He sliced meats and cheeses for nearly four hours while he listened to the boring and uneventful lives of his co-workers. He wondered how those miserable wretches had not ended there very own lives years ago? Would he have to end it for them? That was a possibility.
There were two women and one man in the department that kept him from doing unspeakable harm. He listened to them, he conversed with them and maybe even related to them in some ways.
He had another friend in the store by the name of Ashland. She was able to keep him at bay, he admired her in many ways. She puzzled him in a way that he couldn't describe. He often fell in thought about her but not in any kind of sexual way, a spiritual way. She held the key to something in his life he did not understand.
As he would leave work he would be angered on the way home by rude drivers, people at a fast food restaurant who were very impatient and wanted to push him back in line because they knew he worked in the food industry.
At home he went for his liquor cabinet, he eyed various bottles and came out with plain simple vodka. He poured himself what seemed like a couple of drinks only to realize that the entire bottle was almost gone. He checked his wrist watch again. Look at the damn time, almost 1am. I got home at 6pm, damn!
He lie in bed while he thinks about his day in a flash, as if it almost never happened. Did it actually happen? Or had his day ever began in the first place? Had he been having a nightmare the whole time? An extended dream? Was he really a successful business man dreaming of what might have happened to him if he had not gone to college?
The deli man wakes up in his bed before the sun is even out. His alarm clocked is a red haze of numbers that slowly come into focus and of course he is already running 15 minutes late. He rushes to get showered and ready for a day of work he could do without. He looks at himself in the mirror and contemplates calling in sick for the day which he subconsciously does everyday without really thinking about it. He places his .45 caliber handgun in his bag along with his lunch and bottle of water like he does everyday.
Okay some of you are fortunate enough to wake up from a nightmare like this, but The Deli Man cannot. Please try and be grateful for what you have and learn to treat people less fortunate than you are good. Do not treat them like trash, for some day you will wake up and be them. Your position in life is not permanent. What goes up must come down and vise versa.
