The Equinox

Convenience Stories: Chapter 2

September 24, 2023: The door was locked at A&E Deli when I got there. I hoped that meant I could leave—it was a Sunday morning and the first cup of coffee hadn’t done anything—but as I turned around, a heavyset guy with a lisp stopped me. 

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “My neighbors kept me up all night with their weird foreign music. Church was really long this morning and it took forever to walk my mom home.”

Which is it? I thought. Did you sleep in or did mass run late? Or is Mom a slow mover?

“They got a new priest and he likes to talk.”

An app on my phone beeped. I looked. It was the Autumnal Equinox.

Sometimes the A&E Deli has a smell; this morning, it had the smell. A sickening sweet thing wafted in from the darkened rear of the store. The guy gave me the keys to the lottery machine and used the remote control to turn the TV on above my head. FOX News.

“I don’t like this news, ever since these guys became RINOs,” he said. RINO is short for Republican In Name Only. RINOs are far-left commies like Mitt Romney and over-the-top perverts like Liz Cheney. 

“So why turn it on?” I asked.

“My customers like it.”

Judging by the few customers who trickled into the store (a couple tweens looking for candy and a little old lady buying smokes) no one cared what was on the TV. The woman paid cash. The kids paid with a cellphone app.

“Junior don’t use cash either,” he said when they left. I was surprised that he was old enough to have a child, and shocked that he wasn’t a virgin. “Have you heard of FedNow?”

Of course I hadn’t, so I said so. He went on to describe some sort of PayPal-type service launched by the Federal Reserve.

“The government will use it to look at your bank account, and if you buy something stupid on the internet—pow!—you won’t get it.

I wasn’t sure why the government was stealing my packages, but I kept the thought to myself.

“I’m just waiting for my boy to get back into office and fix the government up.”

As he said this, Ron DeSantis was screaming (something about the border crisis) on the TV above my head.

“Don’t you think DeSantis will take care of things?” I asked.

“I liked him at first, but he is a true RINO,” he replied. This turned into a bizarre rant about how the “gays” made DeSantis “woke” because the “transgenders” who work at Disney World go to college for free? It was all very confusing, and all very annoying. After that, I decided I needed to go home and take a nap. It was a Sunday, so there was no one in the office to check up on me.