A Walk Home From Work

There were tall buildings surrounding me, tearing through passing clouds as I waltzed my way through the masses sharing the sidewalk with me. I was trying to make my way back home from a grueling day at work. Even with the night shift barely clocking out just a few minutes ago, the bustling streets always went out of their way to make the end of my day just a little bit more difficult. It took hours to walk home, every foot step dragging on someone else’s sneakers, often scuffing them, sometimes eliciting a sour look and a dirty glance backwards, as if they were more mad about the fact that I in particular would make them take the time out of their day to waste looking at my sorry face instead of just the fact that I accidentally messed up their shoes, although there were more than an isolated occasion when I was definitely accosted for the offense itself rather than an act of projected personal slight, and of these specific individuals I was rather more appreciative than those whose high-and-mighty attitudes put out an air as though their egos extended past the towers we both stood in the shadow of, as their complaint was much more understandable and their answers were much more human than faces so shriveled and distorted with vitriol that they could scarcely be understood- they wanted to fight me. Sometimes, after a markedly bad shift, I would simply throw my hands down in defeat, and ask them to spare me that specific moment, as I could barely see that there was someone standing in front of me, on account of how absolutely obliterated my vision was, stepping directly out into the blistering sunlight from the backroom’s dank crawlspace-adjacent dimness that put fuzzies in my vision that shimmered and shook and distorted the outlines of everything I was looking at, but sometimes I would also just as quickly and easily put my hands up and on more than one occasion I had been the one to swing first. You wake up quickly once your arms start swinging, because if you don’t than you’re likely to go to bed again in a way your head, your mind, your body, and your soul will very much not appreciate the same way as laying down and gently placing your temples to the pillow you’ve been longing for since you rolled out from underneath the same blanket that you were tucked under just a moment ago, and sometimes there was the off chance that you wouldn’t wake up at all, and you gain nothing from dying, as much as they gain nothing from a manslaughter charge on their way to a fast food job they’re finally going to escape from after all these years of wasted time and energy.

But there was nothing like that today. I just kept walking. There was a wet spot on the concrete that I could not quite recall despite having walked this same route on the way here. I always walked this route, because I one time was harangued by some construction workers on the way here so I made it a point to attempt to wear out this patch of sidewalk, going out of my way to cross the street no matter how inconvenient just to etch a bit more of my foot’s mark into this sorry collection of rubble that they called a sidewalk. Unfortunately, the sidewalk was actually quite pristine, an exquisite shade of white that I had never seen on a patch of sidewalk anywhere else in the world, much less the city, and I had gotten hit by a car last month trying to walk my way over here and, funnily enough, lost the same pair of shoes the workers had commented on, but the shoes weren’t the ones with the principles, were they? In fact, all they could do was lose themselves in the one-sided revenge I was executing on the set of civil workers, one molecule of rubber at a time.

Well, it wasn’t on the entire set of civil workers. There were dozens of them, different teams, some for electrical, some for plumbing and water works, others for the actual cement trucks and for paving and leveling what got laid out, and some to make sure that those people actually knew what they were doing, and some to make sure that the whole thing was executed up to code. But I didn’t really worry about the dozens of others. I didn’t walk on enough of the sidewalk for them all to be worried- With the size of my foot, the amount of sidewalk I covered probably equaled less than the percentage of total work that singular helmeted bum represented. Also, he was the only one who even looked at me, so although once I had gotten drunk and wandered around the entire sidewalk dozens of times, step by step, I ended that night with a split in the side of my head and my face in a muddy gutter, so I understood the folly I was engaging in by that point, and decided to cut my losses with the rest of the team and move on to more targeted engagement.

I did my allotted step count and cursed the man’s name- Jacob, I had decided to call him, if not for my own ill sense of humor in thinking myself as vindictive as the Old Testament chief commandante, then at least in the fact that it meant I was not the one struggling in vain, and I continued down the sidewalk. I was only able to really perform my ritual through sheer rope memorization, as one could scarce see the lines between each tile as per the rain of footfalls that blocked the ground, and I had to perform it rather more quickly as I could hear the agitation of annoyed people behind me as I carefully and methodically cursed Jacob’s work with my own in kind, so I figured it best to cut my losses and quicken my pace, but then I questioned in the first place why I wasted so much time methodically performing my ritual until I remembered- it was all about the principle in the first place, the method and the act itself meaningless except for that. Jacob was not so principled and dignified a man as me, to stick to this kind of plan, to keep his comments to himself and simply think the thought and then be done with it, instead a man who wished to lash out in the world in misery, probably as a result of the fact that the company he worked with had busted the union that had been building there for a few years- I remember reading that the man who had started the last assembly had been found in pieces in some of the very cement that they had used in a bridge just across town, a bridge I hadn’t seen but never planned to visit, as if the fortification in that cement was not steel but human bone, although interesting, I had my rather severe doubts about the veracity of its purported material strength, as it is well known and regarded that the human form is a rather fragile little thing, especially next to the likes of stone.

But Jacob was not stone, nor was his foundation, seeing that the work was very quickly abandoned after this incident was discovered, so in this war of attrition between Jacob and I, it seemed as though this time, Jacob’s perfect record had much been stained, and I felt some smug amount of satisfaction in that, but it was not enough, and so I still continued to tread the way I did upon the sidewalk. But I had already walked past that section of the sidewalk, onto the grimier, older sections of the street, which was everything before it and everything that followed, so I quickly moved on from it. I was halfway home when I felt a few raindrops fall from above, and as I looked up, I saw a stormy grey blanket smothering the blue sky, various shades of tumultuous grey that certainly carried with them wind and rain and perhaps thunder and more, mayhaps lightning, perhaps hail? But this section of the state didn’t really receive hail that much, but it was always a possibility. I had left my umbrella in the backroom on account of the lack of worry when I looked out the windows at the front of the store for the weather, seeing the writhing masses carrying nary an umbrella nor a raincoat in tow, so I must admit I was a bit shocked to feel the inclement weather. But then I looked up again and realized it was simply a droplet from a stray piece of piping running under a gray fabric awning in front of a hotel, so I stepped forward and- no, it was actually coming down rather hard, and as I looked about, there was a sea of umbrellas, I alone in the storm.

What a shame. Good thing I was so close to home, otherwise I would have had to wash my work clothes, or perhaps not wash them, as I could leave them on the drying line and have the drying line become the washing and then drying line with a bit of soap and the weekend’s time to really air them out, as I didn’t work again until Tuesday, but then Tuesday would be a double-shift with Doug. Even though we were the “night crew” they hated us working in the night, because we were given another dollar per each hour of work from 10 in the evening until 7 in the morn, and so they often decided to schedule us to come in from 6 pm to 10 pm and then 7 am to 10 am, and then sometimes around noon when the people who came to drop off the chips and the meats would arrive we would be told to come in for a few hours then as well even though when all was said and done I had initially applied here to be a baker, but I said “screw it” one night when they offered me the extra dollar and now I haven’t seen a loaf of bread that I didn’t purchase and bring home since I first got the job a few months ago. It was a shame, considering I really did love bread-making, but nothing we did was particularly home-style regardless, but the mere act of making bread rise brought me a certain satisfaction, and there was plenty of that to be done in the time between slicing and serving the bread with butter or with jam or putting it on the display racks to waste away for some conniving little eight year old with his mother’s coin purse to throw a dollar and forty-two cents at me in nickels and pennies and then run off with a loaf, one of my beautiful loaves, perhaps the finest I had baked that week considering it was a personal loaf that I snuck in and put out, since perhaps this was the way I could start my bread business, I had always wanted a bread business, but then he decided to run off with it only to trip and faceplant directly into the loaf because he ran past a wet floor sign and crashed into a table and my delectably fluffy loaf of pristine bread was the only thing that could have cushioned his face from breakage, but when the manager came over he scolded the little boy for bringing a competitor’s bread into the store and trying to put it in our wrappings on the shelf, especially without paying for the advertising, and then yoked him up by his collar and threw him out the door without the bread before muttering something to himself and throwing it away, then yelling at me to pick up all the loose change and mop up the floor, so ultimately I thought it better to let sleeping dogs lie and I decided to pick up all the loose change and mop up the floor and keep the information to myself.

That was how my dream of owning a bread business came tumbling down upon itself. I did end up taking the bread out of the trash, which was empty considering how early it was, which made me wonder why the boy had come so early to buy the bread, since the only thing on the shelves was the bread from the day before that the night crew hadn’t gotten around to throwing out, so the responsibility was left to us. I hadn’t gotten to it yet. My loaf was magnificent, by the way. I just regretted that I had ever decided to entrust it to McGilicutty. I simply asked him about the extra dollar on the night crew and the next week I was assigned to the work. What a shame.

Oh, McGilicutty. He had single-handedly ruined my career. He was over-bearing at all times while we shared shifts, but he was never consistent. I could not see him for a week and then three shifts on the same day I could have him breathing down my neck, creeping up behind me quite literally, then berating my placement of crates and pallets. “Why would you place that pallet there in the middle of the aisle,” he would say, knowing we hadn’t seen a customer in the store yet, “when you know customers love these sponges?” He would grab a pack of sponges, demonstrate them to me, as if that would show me just how valuable the presence of the general cleaning sponges was to the airs of the store, and then put it back on the shelf. He would pull a few things forward, cast a few expired boxes to the floor, and then quietly storm off, some of his steps dragging and others like a waist-high march. He wasn’t that bad, really, but I hated being micro-managed, treated like a slave at a job that paid me no meaningfully better, stressful, it was, the incessant presence, like Big Brother watching me through the store cameras that broke from a circuit fried in a thunderstorm much like today a few weeks ago. Even when I knew those cloudy lenses couldn’t truly see me, their stare alone unsettled me, stuck the hairs on my neck on end. It was a horrid way to live, really, but nobody else would take me. A Bachelor’s in Theological Studies wasn’t worth the money I poured into it, clearly, as every religious institution I talked to, primarily Catholic, although it wasn’t to say it was necessarily because it was Catholic as much as it was to say that institutional Catholicism harbors a particular strain of authority that often chafes with authority from education, wouldn’t take me because of the “bastardized secularization of the profound into the redundant profane,” as if they thought that a few choice words I stopped using in essays freshman year would be the thing that won them a war through me that I had no interest in fighting or even prior knowledge of, and the degree didn’t really get me in anywhere else. Well, that’s not true. I had nearly attained a rather high position in an institution of my own choosing, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working with them on a project I would rather not dwell on, but I looked at the demographics and saw a ridiculously disproportionate collection of Mormons in the ranks, and I have nothing but a thorough distaste for, and urge to cross the street whenever I see a Mormon. So I had to humbly decline.

At least I didn’t really see that here. There was a rather opaque verisimilitude that occupied my vision when I looked at my life, whereas when I looked at life with my eyes closed in the night I saw nothing of the sort, but the numbing from work and walking home and working again and walking to work again and walking home and walking to work and working from home at times, looking at my old papers, and accidentally dropping the entire boxful of my papers when I slipped trying to get on the bus and it all fell into a river from a clogged gutter and when I went to grab them I somehow shredded them because they had nearly instantly soaked up their entire absorbing capacity in a mere fraction of a second, the time it took for me to register that there was even an issue with the lid of the box hitting the sidewalk, that my entire life was effectively literally and metaphorically down the gutter in a sick twist of fate, made it feel as though when I really looked at my life in the mirror and saw the face that others took in when they saw me stocking, although mostly it was Mr. McGilicutty since not many others frequented the store despite the heavy foot traffic made me really feel as though my life was fa-

oh, of course. I stood in front of the door to my apartment building in the pouring rain, and as I went to reach for respite, I realized that I had left my keys in my jacket, and I had left my jacket at work. So I walked down the street to grab my jacket, and returned to my building, and went upstairs to clean up after work.