How I Died Right Before Christmas

Everyone has had that moment of kick-your-ass realization that though you have just spent a good portion of your day out running errands, you have forgotten something so critical that it might cause a change in the lunar cycle or possibly even knock the earth out of rotation. In this case it was shallots.

I had been out store-hopping (because in Biloxi you have to go to seven stores to acquire what you could get in one or two anywhere else in the country) for about four hours two days before Christmas to get everything we needed for our Christmas dinner. Filets, cheese, wine: check, check, check. Shallots: horseshit!

Back to Walmart I headed with a dread in my heart not unlike that which I used to carry with me into chemistry tests. Bracing myself as I circled the full parking lot, I repeated the mantra: just run in, grab the godforsaken shallots and get out.

Running through the parking lot. Flying past the tottering old greeter. Dodge the lardass on his scooter to get into the produce section. Target-lock. Shallots in hand. Dashing to the express check out......so....close...

And then I was abruptly cut off by a fat, middle-aged couple wielding a cart with a questionable number of groceries. A little discouraged I got in line behind them. At least there was only them in front of me, and one other person in front of them. Little did I appreciate the cruelty of Walmart. Why else would you put a half-blind, confused, slow-moving cashier in the express line unless you had hidden a camera somewhere and were getting your jollies from watching customers squirm? And squirm I did, because that is what you do when your blood starts boiling.

My patience was wearing thin as the woman in front of me unloaded three or four items from the cart. Then she said that she would be paying for these items separately.

Breathe. Count to 10.

Sometime around the next Christmas this transaction was finished and the cashier turns to the man who pulls out a 12-pack of beer from the cart. The cashier eyes him questioningly and then looks at the rest of the stuff still in there.

"Oh" he mumbled. "I am going to pay for that separately, because this won't cover these."

He was holding out a foodstamp card.

I don't know what the cashier's response was because at that point my head exploded and I died.