PRICE CUTTER

The floating, yellow smiley face had broken into Super Food Gnome and started knocking price tags off of the shelves, revealing lower prices.  When we got there, most of the items were more than half off.  We hid in the produce aisle as it happily bounced off a nearby end cap.  We screamed for it to stop, but it flew away into beauty aids.  My partner got off a couple of shots while I slid down the aisle into deodorants.  I saw the smiley face from behind, right in front of toothpastes.  It hovered between Crest and Aim, as if debating which price it was going to slash.  I slowly got a bead on it and, for a moment, I felt sorry for it.  Where had it come from?  What the hell was it?  And why was it doing this?  I hesitated, but not for long.  It slapped a price tag off the shelf and I fired, blowing a hole in it from behind.  The smiley face hit the ground immediately, spewing blood from its smiley mouth and the golfball-sized hole in-between its creepy, black eyes.  God, those eyes.  I stared into them as my partner bolted from around the corner, having just heard the shot.  I looked down as the black eyes pleaded with me as if to ask, “Why?”  They closed slowly and the smile relaxed into a long straight line.

 

 

I couldn't sleep for about a month.




-SLL