It had been a regular Thursday at the grocery. I had arrived for work at 2:30 p.m. to be the second shift self-checkout attendant. These shifts either went well or who a complete cluster show. I remember that day wasn’t the worst. Ashleigh had the day off, but I received a text from her around 5:00 p.m. asking for me to call her on my lunch break. When my lunch break arrived, I bought a sandwich from the deli, headed out...

Three weeks had passed since Ashleigh left to go back to school in Illinois, and I was sitting in a meeting for what was essentially a “customer first” group (follow the Supervisor and Cashier stories for more on Ashleigh). This group’s purpose was to think of ideas to help improve the customer experience at the store. In reality, that is not what happened at all as it was more of a smokescreen for corporate directives th...

- The third week of June, 2017 - It had nearly been a week since I followed Ashleigh back to her townhouse last Saturday night. I never worked Sundays, and she didn’t work the following Monday, but we had texted back and forth. Most of our conversation was reliving small moments from that night while others were general conversation – including gossip and trash-talking coworkers. Anyways, on Tuesday, I was the afternoon a...

As you may learn from future stories, Ashleigh went back to school in Illinois in mid-August. We met up a number of times in the two months prior and apparently, she didn’t keep some details about us to herself. That didn’t bother me at all. I may have benefitted from her having loose lips. Who did she share some of these details with? Many of the other cashiers, baggers, and other coworkers of ours around her and my ages...

I had just walked in from settling a dispute between two high-school-age bagger gathering shopping carts outside when she flashed me her million-dollar smile.“Hello, Jack.”I was one of the front end supervisors at a local grocery store while I was in college and she was one of my cashiers. It was the summer between her sophomore and junior years at college and I was about to start my fifth year to complete a double major....

Our family originated before the last war from the Dutch-German border area where the dialect Low Dietsch is spoken. My parents used it in the home and so I grew up bilingual in English and Low Dietsch. It was 1960 and I left High School at age sixteen, a young man who had done well at sport but little else. The best opportunity open to me in the City was as a filing clerk at a small Dutch bank located in the financial di...

It is silent except for the humming of the refrigerators, and the sound of Allen's slow and intermittent labored breaths. The pattern alternates between, quick intakes, whooshing exhales, and extended held-breaths altogether. I can't wait to make him moan. Allen's hands are kneading my breasts experimentally, while his eyes haven't left my chest since I gave him permission to explore. "Just be nice to them," I had told hi...