A young girl fell out of a grocery cart in the meat department today. I was right there, looking at chicken when it happened. The rubbery thudding smack her head made against the polished floor was highly audible and excruciating. It rattled my guts. She immediately began to cry, and her mother went to her right away to check if she was okay. I was afraid to look because I didn’t want to see her skull cracked open, but I looked anyway. Her mother frantically parted the girl’s hair and searched her head for a bump, cut, bruise. It was hard to tell the extent of her injuries because the poor girl was wailing so much that her face was red and puffy and streaked with tears. The mother picked her up and held her. Damn, that must have hurt, I thought, and that’s when I noticed one of the meat department clerkies stocking hot dogs onto the shelves a little ways away. He kept looking over his shoulder at the young girl who fell out of the cart, and he was smiling, grinning, on the brink of laughter even.

I was like, damn that is cold. The meat department clerk set the box of hot dogs aside and pulled out his cell phone. He held it up and I could tell he was videotaping the little girl blubbering away like a sad whale who had fallen off the edge of the Earth. The clerk put a hand over his face to hide his laughter. It isn’t funny, I thought. It was horrific. She could have been seriously hurt. What is wrong with people? Oh, yeah. Hate is love now.

The mother and her traumatized daughter eventually sailed away to the produce department, the girl now sitting in the cart part, not the seat part. I wandered behind just to see if anything else was going to happen. I hoped she didn’t have to go to the hospital. How awful it would have been for a trip to the grocery store to turn into a day at the ER where they suffocate you with waiting and paperwork and questions about insurance. Profit over people. Great system. But the mother just gave the girl one of those free bananas to help make her feel better. I’d want something more than that. The girl peeled it and looked at it with tears still in her eyes. She bit into it and chewed through a big sigh. Damn. Life… You never know what’s going to happen next.

By

Aaron Echoes August