Mr. Cogito decided to buy some cheese in the deli, so he stood with several other customers and waited for his turn. On the other side of the meat menagerie, two ladies were engaged in a lengthy conversation. The corpulent one with the spider tattoo behind her ear was grumbling about an injustice someone had done her. Her companion, a slight, older woman with a scowl, listened with interest, neglecting the turkey carvings in her hands.
"Excuse me," a customer interrupted. "I'm in a hurry."
"I'm getting there, darlin'," said the spider lady, who then rolled her eyes and sauntered to the meat slicer. The other shuffled back to the scale, weighed the turkey carvings, wrapped them, and flopped them down on the counter.
"Anything else?" she asked, rather uncordially, brow furrowed, as though she had just carried out an order to kill and prepare a mastodon. The customer lifted the wrapped turkey suspiciously and noted with agitation that she had asked for a pound, not half a pound.
"Take it or leave it, Miss!" came the curt reply. The customer stood paralyzed for
a moment, then took her turkey and trotted off angrily.
Another customer saw this and demanded to know what was going on before being rudely admonished that if he wanted his salami, he would just have to stand there and be quiet.
Mr. Cogito, briefly forgetting the cheese he wanted, cast about for historical traces of what was happening. He recalled famous instances of anarchy, but could find nothing to compare with the deli insurrection. Before long, he was the only one standing at the counter. The others had left with a fraction of their order, or a completely different order, or without having been served at all. Something like this, Mr. Cogito thought, must have happened in the final years of the Roman Empire, under Caligula, or else during the Peasant Revolt of 1381. Didn't Napoleon once endure such a rebellion within his own ranks? He couldn't remember. It seemed unprecedented.
In any case, Mr. Cogito never got his cheese.
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