Title: Odd Retail Experience
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: G
Length: 662 words
Author's notes: Magical realism? Trying a new type of narration too. Also I have never worked in retail.
Summary: Working retail shouldn't be this stressful.


Working retail shouldn’t be this stressful, Malia knew. Millions of people did it every day, and though Malia had never talked in detail to her acquaintances about it, none of their odd retail weird stories sounded like this.

She wasn’t alone in the shop, she knew. Consciously she knew that. And yet, despite seeing her colleague at the till, knowing their manager was in her office, and hearing the newest employee talking in the back, she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all… fake?

It wasn’t quite the right word, and it irked Malia to have it at the tip of her tongue. Fake would imply a level of wilful artifice Malia wasn’t certain existed in the universe, especially to fool someone as ordinary as her. It was far easier to believe that her perception was the one at fault. She must have been mistaken when she got déjà-vu from that argument the new hire was having on the phone for the third time that week. Surely, it couldn’t be the third time his sister had divorced and was filing for custody of her children. It had to be different sisters. Or perhaps Malia had misheard due to the loud ventilation.

She was surely also imagining the palpitations in her chest that appeared only when her colleague at the till smiled at her without blinking, that vapid look in her eyes and head tilted at exactly the same angle every time. Malia hadn’t measured it, but she knew, viscerally, that it was the exact same motion every time without fail. It was surely tiredness that led her to hear faint screams in the sounds of the industrial fans that ran all day and night.

Maybe she should get some sleep. Retail shouldn’t be this stressful.

What Malia didn’t know was that working retail should in fact be this stressful, because retail as a concept was conceived first to cater to the interests of shareholders, second to serve the interests of its paying clients, third, fourth and fifth to serve just about everyone else, and only last, distantly last, after the workers building the roads leading to the place, and the neighbours needing to deal with the increased circulation, and perhaps slightly before the insects who’d been exterminated to build and maintain the retail surface… Then perhaps came the interests of the regular employees. And even then… There was some regulation concerning extinct species that might bring those insects above the interests of people like Malia.

Still, we digress. What Malia didn’t know was that her stress and anxiety was important sustenance to several entities that incidentally tended to make large surface retailers very rich. And thus that even should she share her concerns with her employers (she wouldn’t) and should they even briefly consider her wellbeing (they wouldn’t), crunching the numbers would simply reveal to them that her health was not actually at all important to their success in the current capitalistic environment.

Malia shivered, like suddenly she felt the weight of the world’s indifference to her worry and her plight. How fortunate for her then, that she pushed it out of her mind just as easily as it had slipped in. She blinked, stilling for a few moments as she tried to remember what she was doing. She felt like a weight had settled on her back yet been lifted from her head.

Out of her sight, and outside her plane of perception, the creature that had landed on her back to feed off of her stressful energy was thanking her for the meal, nuzzling her hair to fix her ponytail into something that was more artfully messy than tired-single-mother-chic, before lifting off to rejoin its fellows. Malia would never register the odd interaction, might attribute it to something else if she ever thought twice about it, and would feel all the better for it despite it all.

She would keep working retail however. After all, it wasn’t so stressful.