Six hours a day ringing up the same monotonous figures hour after hour: ninety-nine cents, ninety-nine cents, ninety-nine cents, ninety-nine cents, Consuela manned the electronic cash register, bored, wishing she could be doing something more time-consuming instead, like stocking the shelves or replenishing the warehouse.

Her dark eyes scanned the aisles of shoppers, mostly brown-skinned people from her homeland. The man in aisle two always made her nervous. A tall man in close-cut hair hidden beneath a baseball cap. He was clutching a hand cart and examining a can of Scrub’n Bubbles carpet shampoo as if the directions on the can unleashed the secrets of life.  Consuela took him to be in his late forties, the ravages of some sort of hard life etched into his features like the coarse lines an artisan may etch into a life-like stone bust, permanent and immovable.

“No un hombre feo para un norteamericano,” Consuela thought, but regardless of his physical appeal he somehow made her nervous with each weekly appearance in the store. She couldn’t explain it to herself. He wasn’t there to rob the place but he was just so … unsettling. El diablo en él.

She smiled, weak but polite, when he appeared at the counter with his goods: carpet stain remover, cheap sponges, a bag of cat litter, a box of Kraft microwaveable macaroni and cheese, a package of lavender-scented votive candles, a red squirt gun, and 20 packs each of AA and AAA batteries.

He smiled nervously as she sorted through and scanned the mounds of batteries.

“They’re for toys,” he blurted, blushing. “Toys, yeah.”

“Forty-five dollars,” she said in the fractured and heavily-accented English that embarrassed her.

The man reached into the hip pocket of his dirty jeans and unfurled two twenties and a ten from a wad of currency. When he handed the bills to her the paper was soaked through with sweat. Consuela accepted the sweat-stained cash begrudgingly, suspecting that the sweat of this man’s labors was something she did not want to know about.

Dios mediante.

Further Reading: Trace in Toyland