Different Kinds of Problems

“Speaking of the coronavirus,” Katie says nonchalantly as we walk into the grocery store. “There was a...,” she pauses, “...I’m sorry to say, viral video of a doctor freaking out on his supervisor because he was so overworked, just asking to be fired.”

A man perusing the avocados gives us a bit of a look as we walk by, and we ignore him. I go to the produce section, look around for a moment, and announce, “Looks like they moved the Brussels sprouts again.”

What Women Have To Put Up With

My co-worker is smiling after the slightly sweaty man walks away from her, but her eyes tell another story.

“Oh, this random customer just asked if he could take a picture of me holding a shoe,” she says when I ask her what might be the matter. She takes a deep breath, her face flush, and her smile is hard and angry, just like when she caught a different customer taking a picture of her while she was bent over helping a customer.

“I guess it’s better if they ask first,” she says sarcastically, “like, I don’t mind if you’re creepy as long as you’re polite about it."

A Natural

The sky outside the window turns purple as the night slowly turns into morning. The cat sleeps on the couch next to where I’m lying on my back on the floor.

As I move slowly through a series of stretches and poses called sun salutation, I tie my breathing to my movement (the word yoga coming from the word “yoke,” after all) and my busy mind slows down a little. 

The cat, sleeping on her back, the pure white fur of her belly exposed, one paw thrown dramatically over her face, snores delicately, more relaxed than I’ll ever be.

Darkness

I woke up in the dark last night, terrified because I couldn’t see, when the reason I couldn’t see was, of course, that it was dark.

Tonight, as we walked home from the grocery store, I pointed out a vapor trail from an airplane that extended across the dark sky above. It was a slightly lighter streak of darkness against the greater expanse of night, barely visible in the closer glare of the street lights, and it took her a second to find it.

“See, you’re not losing your vision,” she said. 

Workers Comp

I grab a sizable pile of shoe boxes and head upstairs, and one of my coworkers gets nervous.

“Don’t want you falling down the stairs like [redacted] did yesterday, on the floor all laid out,” she explains.

“He was fine,” another co-worker scoffs. “Down there looking for a check."

Pre-Post-Apocalyptic

After walking up four flights on an escalator that had been turned into regular stairs, the gentlemen with the cane who had made the journey with us questioned whether this movie theater was “ADA compliant.”

“This place used to be kind of awesome,” Katie says as we walk by a sign announcing that the elevators were also out of order. The drain of the drinking fountain is covered in rust, and dust bunnies hang from ceiling tiles that look like no one has cleaned in months.

I find myself thinking about the movie “28 Days Later” for some reason.

Suspicion

The tourists are gathered in a polite semi-circle around the MTA booth, and the guy in the booth is saying over the speaker, “So this is cash-only, here.”

I’m on my way to work, so I continue past, but something about what he said is bothering me as I walk up the stairs from the subway station: was he telling those tourists that he, in his capacity as MTA worker, was only accepting cash? Because that is 100% not a thing and it sounds like something a person who was running a scam on tourists would say to not have to record selling Metrocards to gullible tourists. 

But later, as I’m relating this story to Katie, I realize that he could have been telling these tourists about any number of establishments in the area, and that I should maybe be a little less suspicious.