Little Miss Cart-Left-In-The-Lot

Lyrics

The air smells like hot tar and exhaust.Two in the afternoon at the Aldi on Route 9.A Tuesday.The trunk clicks shut on the eggs and the German chocolate.She wipes a bead of sweat from her temple.Her hand rests on the cart's plastic handle, still warm from the store.The corral is right there.Not twenty feet. Not even ten.Just four parking spaces away.She looks at it.She looks at her driver's side door.The weight of the choice is lighter than a paper receipt.And that's the test. The one nobody sets.No teacher, no god with a clipboard.Just a metal cage for the other carts, waiting patiently.The ten-foot walk she couldn't make.The quarter she decided she didn't want back.The character test failed in three seconds flat.A little push. Not a shove, just a release of responsibility.The left wheel wobbles.It drifts, a slow, metallic sigh, toward the yellow line.A minivan with a faded fish sticker will have to swerve.A kid named Carlos, on his fifth hour of wrangling carts in the sun, will have to walk an extra thirty paces.It's nothing.It's the quiet hum of everything.Maybe she thinks someone gets paid for this."It's job creation," she might call it, if anyone asked.Maybe she thinks nothing at all.The engine's already on.The air conditioning is a cool promise.What's one cart in a sea of them?What's one small duty, unperformed, in a world so full of big ones?The quarter isn't worth the steps.That's the math she did.A simple, silent subtraction.She pulls out onto Route 9.Doesn't look in the rearview.The cart sits there.A small monument to a small surrender.A question nobody asked, with an answer she left behind.