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The cashier is wearing a necklace that is supporting his late girlfriend's bleeding heart. He strangled her during
his lunch break after she admitted she had been sleeping with the deli's sandwich maker. After strangling her,
he calmly used a butcher's knife to slice open her chest and remove her heart. He attached the heart to a string
of leather, bowed his head, and slipped the necklace on, delighting in the symbolic nature of the act. Then he
tossed his girlfriend's mangled corpse into a dumpster that was conveniently located fifty stories beneath her
apartment window.
The sandwich maker is standing in a shadow behind the cashier, making sandwiches. He doesn't know that his mistress
has been murdered, but the fact that her bleeding heart is hanging from the cashier's neck is making him a little
suspicious. He'd know that bleeding heart anywhere. The way he is eyeing the back of the cashier's head is the
way Sean Penn eyes the paparazzi the moment before their flashbulbs pop.
The walls have been painted deep, deep red by a painter named Clyde Von Wippleby, who, coincidentally, happens
to be sitting at a table in his dirty overalls eating a chicken salad sandwich. Bread crumbs are scattered like
flakes of dandruff all over his burly Nietzschean mustache. He has no connection to the cashier or the sandwich
maker other than the fact that the sandwich maker made his sandwich, the cashier charged him $6.95 for it, and
he is the grandfather of the cashier's late girlfriend. Unlike the sandwich maker, the painter's attentiveness
to the bleeding heart is ephemeral, confusing it as he does with a dirty, oversized amulet.
There is a picture on the wall. The picture depicts a murder. In one of the murderer's hands is a bleeding heart,
in the other is a vegetarian sandwich.
There is Muzak in the air. The Muzak is fast-paced, edgy and metallic; yet at the same time it possesses a certain
soothing quality. It adequately reflects the current state of the mental universe of the murderer in the picture
as well as the murderer behind the cash register.
There are giant plasma TVs hanging down from every ceiling corner. Each of the TVs is running different episodes
of the same sitcom, and each episode sees the protagonist of the sitcom murdering his numerous girlfriends with
numerous sharp objects. In between thrusts of the sharp objects, the protagonist often pauses, turns to the camera
and says something funny. All of the TVs have been muted so as not to clash with the Muzak, but close-captioned
lines of script materialize at the bottom of the screens whenever the protagonist speaks, and whenever his girlfriends
scream and curse, and whenever the laugh track sounds off.
At one table, a heart surgeon is trying not to think about the operation he screwed up that morning as he eats
a bowl of psychedelic mushroom soup. He is still wearing his sky blue OR uniform, which is splattered in places
with blood and viscera. When he purchased the soup from the cashier and saw the heart hanging from his neck, he
thought the young man was taunting and making fun of him, but then he realized there was no way the cashier could
have known that the heart surgeon had, just an hour ago, accidentally performed heart surgery on an errant lung
he mistook for an errant heart. So he simply gave the cashier a dirty look.
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FastCounter
by bCentral
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