Sweet Visions of Release

Retail is a vicious and blood drenched sport.

Shoppers are scurrilous dogs - there can be no escaping that fact. Underdeveloped intellectually and psychologically, they seek gratification in being waited on. Makes them feel superior.

Even though they are less consequential than the shit beneath the shoes.

Who are these people? What mutation resulted in the shopper psyche?

Strange people, wandering around the store with an unnatural, Satan-like light in their eyes. Pawing through racks of clothes, choosing this, discarding that.

"Can I set these things (all 18 of them) down here while I continue to shop?"

"Sure, if you have a death wish. If you want me and mine to feast on your liver tonight."

Slithering into the dressing room to try things on. Loving themselves in the mirror. Like clothes will wash the stink off of their rotting souls.

Leaving stuff behind. Lots of stuff. Some on hangers, some on the floor. The hangers themselves tangled together like thoughts in an otherwise empty head.

Wrestling with tangled hangers is more frustrating than dealing with life itself; it provokes feelings of great vengeance and furious anger.

Visions of mutilated shoppers provide the only relief.

"How much did you charge me for that green sweater? It's supposed to be a dollar, you know."

"How much will you charge me to remove your head with a scythe?"

Closing time. One of their kind approaches the counter with a cart filled to the brim with clothes and fucking Christmas ornaments and that VHS player they just had to have to validate their stubborn clinging to the past, like a demented nonagenarian who recites names of childhood friends while forgetting to bathe.

The clock ticks past closing time and three other creatures wait impatiently behind idiot shopper #1, who babbles incoherently as precious purchases are rung up.

You wish with everything that is in your heart for the power to make her head explode just by thinking about it. Picturing brain bits slowly sliding down the walls as shopper #2 steps up to take her place.

Undaunted.

Retail is the jungle, baby. It makes killers of us all.