Supermarket Historians
All historians should be supermarket cashiers. Imagine what we’d learn; “Your total comes to $10.66, and that’s the year the Norman’s invaded Britain” or, “that’ll be $18.61, the year the Civil War began.” Now all my receipts are beaches where six-year-olds find bullets in the sand. My tomatoes add up to Hiroshima, and if I’d bought one more carton of milk the cashier would be discussing the Battle of the Bulge and not the Peloponnesian War. But I’m tired of buying soup cans full of burning villages, tired of hearing the shouts of Marines storming beaches in the bread aisle. I want to live in a house carved into a seed inside a watermelon, to look up at the red sky as shopping carts roll through the aisles like distant thunder. (from Dynamite on a China Plate) |