It felt like her chest was folding itself into a fist, like it was collapsing onto itself and coiling into a ball. Her body followed - folding down and coiling into a ball on the floor. Her cheek brushed against the cold linoleum and she could feel how filthy it really was. She never spent time looking down, but it became clear that the convenience store employees didn’t do much maintenance. She thought about that awhile. About the dirty floor pressing against her face and how much she hated it.
Then she thought about dying. She was so sure that these were her last moments. She wished she could die somewhere else. She wanted to die of something else. To her, this was embarrassing. Her body fucked up and killed itself. If she had any say in how she got to die, it wouldn’t be something that was her fault. Maybe she would get hit by a car. Maybe she’d get shot in a mugging gone wrong. No matter what it was, she wouldn’t want it to happen anywhere near that filthy floor. It wouldn’t have been anywhere in that shitty little suburb. Ideally, she thought, she would have lived a full life, married rich, and died peacefully in her sleep on a bed worth more than her current liquidated networth. She wouldn’t be grating her cheek against dirty linoleum. Her eyes wouldn’t be fixated on mold underneath shelves of Doritos. She wouldn’t be able to feel her body choking the life out of itself.
One of the employees from the counter walked over to her. He was wearing a black polo that was given to him by the company. Black, but you could still see the stains that he might not have tried to wash out in the first place. His hair was greasy - brown, but maybe it was blond. He smelled like stale tobacco and unwashed hands. She was glad she couldn’t smell his breath.
She didn’t know how many seconds she had left, curled up on the floor, surprised she could still think so clearly, and terrified that the bacterially cultured young man would somehow make everything worse. He didn’t know what to do. Every instinct he had told him to ignore the woman on the floor, but he he knew that wouldn’t go over well. Nobody else in the store knew what to do either. He asked her a question.
“Ma’am, do you need any help?”
The words came out the exact same way they did when he said them to customers who looked like they couldn’t find what they needed between the six rows of shelving in the store. As if it were a normal situation that could be quickly resolved. He stood there waiting for an answer from the woman dying on the floor. She had to collect as much bodily capability as she could to give him a response that might be indicative of the severity of her issue. A grunt was pushed out of her mouth that loosely resembled a plea for help.
“I’m g’in’ to get a manager.”
He still didn’t have any instinct for what he should do in the situation, but his quickened pace suggested he might be beginning to understand how serious it was. It was taking longer for him to get back than she thought it should. Her vision was losing focus. She felt nauseated. Any doubt she had about dying today was gone. It was certain. She knew she would die.
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