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Eye violence!
This Everyday Anxiety contains
Supermarkets were always too loud, too bright, and too busy, with too many people slowing down and looking confused around every entrance. Why the service desk had to be at the front of the store he didn’t know, but it always made it three times more inconvenient when he actually needed it. Not to mention the fact that you could only get cigarettes here now, so half the people in front of him were impatient and smelled strongly of second-hand smoke.
The line wasn’t long, at least. He hated the service desk, they always had the cashiers doing double duty with the express checkout these days, so it didn’t matter what side of the counter you were on you were always kind of ruining their shift.
He stepped up to the counter, cold and damp box in one arm, receipt pressed firmly to the top of it with his thumb. It took a second for the harried looking cashier to return from the other side of the cigarette podium.
“What can I do for you today?”
He held up the box with a grimace. “I have to return this. I got it home and realised the best before was two weeks ago.”
The cashier nodded, taking it from him. “And this is the receipt for it?” She flipped it around and checked it carefully, squinting at the tiny, half smeared font on the transparent paper.
He could swear they made it harder to read on purpose. “Yeah, got it yesterday after work. It was going to be my dinner, but, hey.” He gestured at the best before date, the humour falling flat between them.
“Okay.” She nodded, setting the receipt on the counter. “It was purchased with a card, so I’m afraid I can’t give you cash for it.”
“That’s alright,” he said, digging into his pocket for his wallet. “I’ve got the same card here, that’s what you need right?”
“Yeah,” she said, giving him a smile. “I’ll just need to print the refund receipt and get you to sign it, so that we can acknowledge the refund and your permission for the processing fee.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, nodding again and taking the pen when she handed it to him.
Eftpos systems and their processing fees, that was how they got you. Zero-point-seventeen percent or whatever on an eight-dollar frozen dinner wasn’t going to hurt him, but he couldn’t help but wonder what how many of those over a day would add up into for an entire chain of supermarkets. No wonder they were pawning it off on the customer base.
He signed where she indicated on the same, glossy, semi-transparent paper, and then she pulled a wired card machine out from under the counter. “Card in here,” she pointed at the slot at the base as she plugged in the total on the keypad. “And then processing fee on this one.”
The top of the card machine had a rounded base with a spike sticking out of it.
Was… was he supposed to put the receipt on there? He’d used receipt spikes before, but only plastic ones, he didn’t even know they still made the metal ones. Health and safety and everything. This one even looked like someone had accidentally stabbed themselves on it before, a gross, reddish-brown patina coating the metal.
She caught his expression and gave a rueful twist to her mouth. “Yeah, it’s pretty archaic. Don! Can you supervise a return for me?”
The burly looking guy manning self-checkout over the divider had barely finished nodding before she was calling “Next please!” and reaching for the cigarette cabinet again.
He stepped aside to leave room for people coming up beside him and gave a small smile to ‘Don’ who grunted and barely acknowledged him. The eftpos machine beeped, small screen requesting his card, and he slid it in on the chip side, pressing for the first account.
Don yawned.
It took a few seconds to think about it, archaic indeed. But the screen finally changed from ‘Authorising…’ to ‘Processing fee [2] will apply: Continue?’
“Processing fee 2, huh?” he said wryly, showing the screen to Don before he pressed ‘accept’. “Real specific.”
Don snorted, stepping in. “Yeah, it’s a pain. We get good training on it though. You ready?”
“Ready for wh—”
Don’s hand curled in the hair at the back of his head and slammed his head down towards the spike before he could even react. He flinched, instinctively, but there wasn’t any pain, just a heavy, heavy pressure that felt like it was radiating around the socket of his right eye.
It wasn’t until he heard the wet popping noise and felt the spike slide deeper into his eye that he realised what was happening. The idea of it made his knees weaken and head spin, bile rising in his throat. A horrible scraping noise reverberated through his skull as the spike hit the back of his socket and he moaned faintly.
The hand on the back of his head rotated slightly, then pulled back, and to his horror, he could feel the eyeball separating from socket as Don lifted his head. Don was saying something, but he couldn’t hear it over the ringing in his ears.
He was released, and he staggered back a step, not quite realising he was upright once more. Visual snow was the only thing he could process, and his stomach rolled with nausea as he tried to blink and focus, everything out of depth and slightly wrong.
A pair of hands clasped his head again, pressing soft gauze against his forehead, tape adhering to skin, and someone was tucking hard-edged plastic into his hands. “—and thank you for coming, have a nice day.”
By the time he processed that it was over Don was gone, back disappearing into the check outs, and the line had moved forward, no one sparing him a glance. He was left standing a few paces back from the counter, clutching his card and receipt, staring blankly into his new field of vision.
Rory Banks 