Razor loves me he love me he love he love me long time I write in curly blue letters with the pen I stole today, in the book I stole today.
A moment of clarity at the shop: the more kids you have the fatter you get. I told Tracey and she cracked up and then we kept making faces at each other each time a heifer herded through a guzzle of children.
School holidays finishing soon and new year starting and the parents swarm through trying to get the next generation of diet doctors and home facial specialists and coffee monkeys and vacant drones and bullies and sluts and harpies and witches and wizards interested and invested in paper and folders and pens and erasers. The pre-school kids stumble around, mostly vacant and generally unaware what they are doing here. Something is going on and it apparently is exciting and will be fun but then they turn up in a place with paper and they learn their first lesson: adults lie.
The older kids slump around, contributing only when their mom cracks and threatens to get the ugliest books and binders we sell (aisle 2, a vinyl-plastic the colour of unwashed everything). Some of the kids are deep into the generational warfare and so they shrug and fire off another don’t-care missile, secure in their dominion over mom and dad. They know the only rule that matters: the winner is the one who cares the least.
Who cares the least out of us?
Tracey is like me: no kids, no mortgage, no car and no debt. No debt because no bank will open the door to flakes who have had more jobs at 22 than they have fingers and toes. Her mom and dad give her cash every now and then and so she could probably leave this job. She cares less than me.
Shirt stain isn’t like me: no kids, no mortgage, has a car that looks like it was designed for a bubble or Pac Man to drive, and maybe debt. I have no idea if he has debt because I let his words and ideas flow through me down an ignorant pipe that is manned by no one. Every time he shuffles over, jiggling in that early thirties way that equals heart attack by fifty-five, I click off the mental recording gear and turn into a mirror. He is a workaholic who argues with his fiancé about staying at work. How he got her we can’t determine. No one has ever met her and there are rumours she is just a paid service that calls the office to make it look like he has human parts. He cares less than me.
Five assorted stock-kids who drift and change every few months when they get sick of Stain “cracking down” on paperclip shelf order or sugar control or discover he puts the work clock forward in the morning and then back after lunch to squeeze another ten minutes out of everyone unpaid. They care less than me.
Kara the payroll troll, Queen of the Time Cards, Watcher of the Bathroom Breaks, Grand High Whatever of Pointless Rules, sitting in her little cave, pulling levers, pressing buttons, convinced she is keeping the world running but unaware the levers connect to nothing; the buttons are dead. She is married and made hard by the pressure of children I guess. Or she could have been that way her entire life. I wonder sometimes if she too has a moment of clarity and the young Kara wakes up to glimpse the new world. Obsessed and possessed and distressed and -essed in every way … she cares less than me.
Razor razor razor out right now with half my pay looking for something to brighten the day, hip hip hooray, ok? It’s Poetry – oh Noetry and I can’t visit the website that comes from because we sold the laptop two week ago. I circle his name again with love hearts and at the same time decide I care the most at work because without work I wouldn’t have the money and without the money Razor would have to steal more and then he might get caught and then I’d never see him again.
So I care the most. More than Razor, more than Stain, more than Kara, more than stock-kids, more than Tracey. More than – Razor is back.
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Fragment slice speck part moment bit – words arranged with punctuation.