Face Down

My wife and I never shopped at Walmart. We had tried shoping there a few times when the first one opened up near us in the mid 90’s, but we really didn’t care for the clutter, the cramped aisles, and the toothless people dragging their messy-bottomed babies all over the floors. But eventually one day I saw an advertised item (a cheap XBox 360) that tempted us to venture back inside. Could it really be as bad as we’d imagined all these years? Surely the place had been classed up somewhat in over 10 years.

We found the sales staff reasonably helpful, and the shoppers inside weren’t too much different from the people seen in Target or the mall. The store was out of the advertised game system, so we left, but we felt maybe the place wasn’t quite the circus we’d remembered, and considered driving to a different location that still had the machine in stock.

Then on our way out, we noticed a small group of gawkers crowding around something on the ground just outside the exit. A man in a trucker’s cap and a wife beater was passed out cold, face-down on the sidewalk (and I mean literally face-down, nose smashed perfectly into the concrete). There was an empty beer bottle not far from his hand, and a large, spreading puddle of some sort of liquid that he was laying in. The puddle didn’t really look like it had come from the bottle. Standing over him was a middle aged female Walmart employee, puffing on a cigarette, warning everyone to “get back, I can’t let’cha touch him”.

We went on our way, confident that the situation was in the most capable of hands.