November 20, 2009
You are working at a grocery store with your old boss, a good friend, who is, in this dream, cruel and unkind, much like she was in real life (but never to you). The store is under threat of closing soon, and you’re doing your best to keep it afloat, but there’s too much to be done. The store itself is the largest you’ve ever seen, and there are only ten or fifteen employees to keep it running, instead of the hundred or so it needs. Your coworkers aren’t doing anything, but you find you can’t complain, because you spy on them, like they are soap opera characters. A woman in her late thirties is dating your friend, who is all of nineteen, still gangly and growing into his limbs. A black man in his forties is trying to teach your boss Spanish because he has a crush on her. Your boss is, like in real life, hiding her ovarian cancer under getting her hair bleached blond and a string of dalliances with young men.
In the end, the store can’t handle the pressure, and your boss’s cancer gets worse, and she snaps and fires you all, shoving you out the door. “I can run this store myself!” she screams, her eyes red. “I don’t need any of you!” And you all stand in the parking lot, hugging goodbyes, resolving to never see each other again, watching her through the windows as she tries to run an entire store herself.
In the end, as you are walking home, you see the woman in her thirties and your friend kissing passionately, before she drives off and he peddles on his bike in the opposite direction, but then she turns around, and he gets in the car, and they go on together.
