Page 1 of Two Marlboros

1

The witness

(?Shania Twain - That don’t impress me much)

The cookie slipped from Cathy’s hands. From behind the counter, I watched it hit the floor and crumble into many small pieces.

“You’re such a fool!” her brother scolded her.

The little girl grabbed onto Jane’s skirt and pulled it. “Mom! Mom! Carter told me I was stupid!”

The woman huffed and pushed her daughter aside, opened her bellows wallet and turned to me. “How much is it, Nathan?”

Cathy approached her mother’s skirt again - and then I heard the firstcracksound of the splattered cookie - but her brother grabbed onto the little girl’s backpack, causing her to cry out in fright. He took a large purple marker out of it and walked toward the shelves on the right with a grin on his face.

“Ten dollars and sixty cents.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I found Carter intent on venting his artistic streak on the breakfast cookie packages: he seemed to have daubed them with an eight-ray sun and a few stars. His artwork finished, he retraced his steps and began to deal with the calendar on the wall, of which he coloured the space in the zeroes that made up the year 2001.

I smiled and pretended nothing happened, as I was a nice guy, but Jane must have seen something because she snapped at Carter and snatched the marker from his hands, then gave him a slap on his collar.

“Are you crazy? Now we have to pay for everything!”

He didn’t have time to say anything else, because behind his back something crashed to the ground.

Cathy had dropped a stack of snacks and seemed quite pleased with her work. After all, I was sure she had thought: if Carter was soiling the cookies, why couldn’t she play with the snacks?

Jane hid her face behind her hands and a couple of dark hair strands escaped from her bun. She grabbed Carter by one wrist and Cathy with the other hand - anothercracksound of smashed cookies - then looked at me, bewildered, perhaps on the verge of committing murder, using snacks as a weapon.

“I’ll be back in five minutes!”

And so, as the two bashers wriggled, she crossed the threshold of the mini mart, thanks to an outgoing customer who opened the door for her. Carter and Cathy had left a crumbled cookie on the floor, an art covered cookie pack and packets of snacks scattered like toy soldiers as souvenirs.

Once they were out, the place went quiet. I put Jane’s groceries aside and observed the mess inside the store, dejected. Only an old man who visited every other day, usually to buy beer, was left to roam the shelves. A little later he arrived at the checkout counter with a couple of Bud Light cans in his hand, and yet I heard another, but now faint,cracksound of the poor cookie slipped from Cathy’s hands. I hoped it hadn’t gotten caught in the floor joints, because I was going off duty in five minutes and I didn’t feel like scraping the filth.

“That’ll be two dollars.”

The old man slipped a trembling hand into his pocket, pulled out the coins and placed them on the counter.

“Ah, today’s youth!” he cried out.

I didn’t know if he was mad at me or at the two little beasts who had just left, but I thought they were still too young to fallinto the category of “youth” so despised by 80-years-olds. Maybe he was just mad at the world.

“And this beer is too expensive! I’m not coming back here anymore.”

I lost count of the number of times he had said that.

As soon as the old man had gone, I fell onto the stool behind the cash register. Drops of sweat ran down my forehead, between my shoulder blades, on my chest; even my head was sweating, but that mini mart was too shabby to afford an air conditioner.

I heard footsteps on my right, followed by the sound of something slicing through the air. Molly had come out of the mini mart staff room with a pin on her chest and a fan in her hand, and she was blowing air over her face and neck; she came up to me and began to wave, just enough to dry the drops of sweat on my skin.

“Rough day, huh, Nate?”

She sat on the stool next to mine and continued to air me. She moved the fan between both of us because she felt hot too.

“Since school ended, she’s been bringing them here almost every day, have you noticed? And even at home I hear them screaming from morning to night, even though there’s a wall separating us.”

“Luckily there are other clients to brighten your days...”

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