SOMETIMES I DON’T WEAR MY GLASSES or my contacts because I’m sick of seeing all the beautiful people in my city. They make me feel green as I listen to their silky shirts lick their skin and the hollow, yet echoing sound from a woman’s shoes. Five days out of seven I am on this Magnificent Mile where these beautiful people will walk past, bumping, stepping on and forgetting me. I’ll just stop walking on the sidewalk to get anyone’s attention, but nothing. As I watch, they all shimmer like smoke, walking in a rhythm I can’t find. What if I took a stethoscope and placed it on their hearts so I can count the beats that allow them to live? I need to hear the sound of someone else’s life drumming in my eardrums like a Killers’ song. A sound that renders an F-sharp stings me and then I realize something. I have ten minutes before my shift starts, so I run past them as cotton sticks on my skin and my black hair slaps my shoulders and face.

After the employee entrance I have four flights of stairs to run up and for once I am hot. By the time I make it to the top, my breath is jagged and my skin glistens from the stress to make it on time. I punch in and start my workday, smile, and attempt to speak. My throat is dry. I’m trying to greet these beautiful women and I can’t. Usually I’m good at talking to complete strangers. I’m even better at convincing them to buy more merchandise they don’t need to feed their habits that are aching all over their expensive bodies. I can roll seven reasons off my tongue like the Pledge of Allegiance. I can spot who will actually buy things by the way they talk, the way they ignore me, the way they walk. I can hear money through their voices. Most women sound like Daisy Buchanan on the Magnificent Mile. But today, I can’t. Actually I don’t really want to. I have to. I have to because I only work on commission, and if I don’t sell anything, I don’t make anything.

I hate the way these beautiful people treat me. Sometimes I’ll say a simple, “Hello” and they’ll walk right past me. These women think they’re better than me. They don’t know this is a job not by choice. They don’t know I’m in school. They don’t know I’m graduating. They don’t care. That’s when I look down Magnificent Mile and see nothing magnificent on it and nothing magnificent about them. Why is it that an hour for lunch feels like five minutes, but when I am clocked in for an hour, it feels like five?

I’m back to following women like flower girls. My voice may not sound like money, but it sounds like the envy of having something you don’t and it invades their mind. That’s the thing about these beautiful people. They’re stupid—fluent in the language of haughtiness. Our dialects don’t match.

They bait me with fancy shoes, fancy jewelry, fancy clothes and sometimes won’t buy a single thing, just to prove a point: they control my paycheck. Because at the end of the day, I’m not winning. Man wasn’t born free, Rousseau.

And the chipped pieces of my dignity are left at the bottom of their Jimmy Choos and they are off to get facials or fly to Paris or buy a car. I’ll look at the associate next to me and see hope in his smile and bills paid in his eyes as he rings up a 1,200-dollar sale. But I know something he doesn’t or maybe something he convinces himself not to believe. That all the stuff he sold is coming back, because that’s what we do. We convince, we sell, they rent. We rent merchandise and the returns come out of our paycheck. Sometimes I fall asleep in my glasses so I can see in my dreams. But they’re filled with teardrops of blurred vivid colors.
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ANDREA REHANI is a first-year MFA student at The New School with a concentration in Creative Nonfiction. She graduated from DePaul University with a BA in Creative Writing. Her poetry has been published in Prevail and Prosper and Young Chicago Authors. You can find her on Twitter: @smallsstack