Yellow and White Plaster

Yellow and White Plaster by Ashlyn Moody

Photo credited to Globe and Mail.

My future was chosen by the heavens. I was never held accountable for any of life’s twisted actions or decisions, rather they were thrust upon me with the delicacy of a lightning storm.  My dreams, my hopes, my ambitions, and even my few feeble plans, destroyed by the Divine Creator, the universal energy, or whatever other higher power our stoic society chooses to bow to. Oxford, the world renowned intelligence, quotes my name as “victim of fate.”

I watch the cream corn lead paint shrivel to reveal the confining metal of the nutrition baby carriages. Accompanied by a shriek, and preceded by a monogamous tone of unoiled wheels, this is my life...my career, my one “greatest” pride. A bell hop for “no frills” grocery carts.  

Everyday I stagger the tarnished asphalt, a ghost to those who pass by. Mothers cradling infants, smothered with fleece blankets like butchered crabs served at high society dinners, march by as they hiss on their cell phones. They complain of the “indecency” of neighbors who had not acknowledged them within the store. Teenagers accompanying their grandparents, scuff their feet behind elders who have hips much more ancient than they. They do not concern themselves with other human beings, therefore, they certainly do not wave, grin, nod, glance, or even allow a thought to waver toward me. After all, I am only an employee of “no frills”. The unlucky soul sent to collect shopping carts in any tragic gift Mother Nature sees fit to offer.

Day in and day out, my schedule remains unchanging. Herd the carts, march them to the China-produced, yellow and white, banana covered signs, and repeat. I have certain special tasks, such as ignoring the snot covered toddlers who poke at chewing gum stuck to the fake plaster posts; they’re somebody else's problem. Greet the aged,the withered, the ones who struggle while holding their aluminium canes, especially on old age pension day...we survive from their business. Finally, don’t injure the four wheeled metal fortresses, “protected” by the three faded white lines...scrape the paint, and it comes off my paycheck. Day in, day out, only the squeak of dated plastic wheels acknowledge my existence.

I dreamed of a life which brimmed with much more than this bland grandeur. As a child growing up on the Canadian coast, all things natural and pure inspired the “little man” who spoke within my head, while hindering my development. Every Sunday, I prayed to a reverend God, asking him/she/it to provide me with a life stuffed with adventure. While the congregation demanded world peace and the end of child hunger, I begged for airplanes, heros and time travel. My destiny did not exist here on Earth.

The blue and white which hung above the world’s head, terrifying so many, would become my slave. I would navigate the many cotton candy canals, leaving my own fume clouds as a marker of where I had been. The tyrants, oppressors and villains of the world, would fear me. Swings of my sword or a pull of my gun trigger would provide the death blow which no other mortal seemed capable of offering...I would be a liberator, a hero. Even time itself, a dimension which perplexed the Einsteins of any era, would kneel to me. It would offer all the secrets it had withheld for five billion years, exposing them to me. Dinosaurs would be my playmates...cavemen would be test subjects for my early scientific experiments. At ten years old, the world was mine. But real life had a tendency of getting in the way.

I did not become a pilot, a noble man, or even a world traveller, much less a time traveller. Rather, life handed me a mouth to feed when I had not yet managed to obtain a slip of paper from my local high school. It gave me a habit of subjecting those around me to drunken rages, which involved obliterating cheap wood furniture and decimating multiple bottles, angered quickly from the situations fate offered me. Life provided an unfaithful partner, stacks of paper covered in numbers which proclaimed I owed money to men I had never met, and finally, the departure of the little mouths I cursed over, but only because I loved them so dearly.

“no frills” was my saviour. It gave a drunk, wife beating, child abusing man, a ten dollar per hour job. I was worth that. For pulling carts I could now provide myself with a 200 foot by 200 foot cage, heat for certain intervals of the day, cheap, polyester t-shirts and jeans, and an endless supply of frozen cuisine...the essentials.

“Danny, don’t you dare touch that!”

“God, I can’t believe she did that! The nerve of some people!”

“Anne come here, your father wants to speak with you on the phone! HE can handle this! You tramping around the streets wearing this abomination, is NOT my issue to handle! Who is it you want to impress, huh?! Creeps like him!!?”

Day in, day out, I hear the conversations, but they do not include me. Our company sign is the only constant in my planned life. Clean and brightly colored, the florescent yellow stands out against the pale plaster which it bethrones. The arrangement of letters looks comforting, as if it guarantees shoppers a pleasant shopping trip. One without stress, one accompanied by smiling faces and friendly words... a trip to enjoy. In reality, I knew they were hollow.