I had only worked at the dollar store on Lolita and Franklin for about 2 weeks before I met the customer that made me want to quit. I needed this job badly, but I would need witness protection after what happened two days ago.

Last Tuesday, a heavy-set woman by the name of Linda Bingham walked into the store, and after 40-ish minutes of intense cart rolling, she made her way to checkout lane 7 and I knew the next few moments would be trouble. Her skin was translucent like tissue paper; her veins were a bluish green and her skin was spotted like a speckled egg. “Did you find everything you needed today?” I asked. She put sponges, facewash, shampoo, a bag of ice, plates, a canvas, and 30 other miscellaneous items on the rotating belt. The items were a mass of uselessness, and as they got closer to me, she finally responded, “Most of it anyway.”

“How was your day?” I asked, foolishly.

“I would be lying if I said I hadn’t seen better days,” she responded.

I gave the woman another once over before I began scanning her items. Plates for dinner—for a family that is so obviously stressing her out. Bags of ice for a broken ice maker, shampoo to maintain her haughty hairdo and facewash to treat her rosy face. The canvas I couldn’t peg though. Apparently, someone in the family likes to paint. How bad could her day have truly been? All I ever saw before me two days ago was a regular woman buying regular items and expressing regular stress about her regular life.

She went on to tell me about her day some more, but I zoned out; she noticed my disinterest and ceased speaking. “Thank God” I thought to myself—I was dreading the idea of listening to her nasally voice for another second. After exactly 12 minutes of scanning and transaction, the large woman walked out of the store and I had hoped that was the last time I would ever see her. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

I left work that night, exhausted. I came upon my last turn before I reached my street and heard a wretched cry coming from an isolated house. The lights were in and cars were in the driveway, so I assumed all was well—none of my business anyway, but it was. My mom woke me up the next morning and told me to turn on the news. “Which station,” I asked. “Just pick one,” she said. I turned on channel 8 and for the second time in 24 hours I laid eyes upon 49-year-old Linda Bingham, charged with first-degree murder for killing her husband Eric Bingham. She called the police around 11:35 pm and told them in a very numinous voice that after taking a shower and making her husband dinner, she stabbed him in the abdomen 15 times with a screwdriver. When police arrived, they found 2 of the man’s limbs in a box freezer, and most strange, a canvas in the corner of the living room with blood splatter strewn across the once white space. She stood up and allowed police to cuff her with no struggle. Chills ran down my spine as the newscasters continued their recap of the night’s events. That feeling of formication let me confirmed that my time at the dollar store was coming to an end.