mint chips
"just hope everything is ok" she said sweetly smiling, glancing downward.
the cash drawer pings open, "a typical spring-loaded function," i thought, as she wrapped my 'all natural' bittersweet chocolate bar in brown paper. as if anything could possibly be unnatural.
inside the drawer, rumpled and flattened in dark corridors the cash is segregated by denomination, separated by walls. the hundred dollar bill, benjamin greenback, cries out to his son, "50 clams bill! where are you son?" "i'm here, pap! i'm ok, the restraining bar is loose. there's just two of us in here, me and this guy jack" "i'm alone here, son, i'm fine too, i just wish we could be together" and so on, all the way down to tiny wailing baby dollars. squeezed together like sardines, shoved thoughtlessly into seedy orphan housing, never seeing their mothers again. and they are given new names, such as 'buck' and 'moolah'. a 20 dollar bill is almost always a mother with at least one teenager in the house and a few toddlers.
she has to make dreadful sacrifices every day.
the change boxes at front are jingling. house pets and roaming creatures. it's tragic.
what a system, i thought. inside a child's piggy bank, a money clan can stay for years in familial commune, until the walls crack open one day, and someone ends up in another drawer, at a candy store with a bunch of strangers, crammed together in a temporary holding bin. sometimes they are jailed, without any offense, in locked boxes in a vault. it's terrible the way it happens. and nobody even cares.
"oh yes, it's fine, i mean the chocolate-covered samples were wonderful. mint chips. pineapple. coconut. all very tasty, thanks."
