Providing A Baby For My Billionaire Stepbrother

Sash stands anxiously at the check-out, her heart thumping wildly in her chest. Behind her, a large queue snakes towards the center of the supermarket, irritated customers happy to glare at her angrily.

“Come on, please”, Sash quietly whispers to herself. Every so often she cranes her neck to try and look at the till, before looking back to her left, horrified to see someone else join the ever-increasing line.

The plump assistant clicks chewing gum against her teeth while she waits for the machine to tell her what to do next. Her skin is so fake-tanned and dented by acne, she looks like a gigantic orange. Next to her, Sash could be a completely different species. She’s compact but perfectly proportioned, with delicate features and gorgeous eyes.

The human orange looks from the computer up to Sash and blinks slowly, one eyelid slightly behind the other, like a treefrog waking up.

“Denied”, she says lazily. Clack goes the chewing gum against her teeth.

“That can’t be”, Sash says. “I put money in there on Wednesday.”

“Today is Friday”, the assistant says flatly, as though Sash may have overlooked a crucial piece of information. “Maybe it went somewhere else on the days in between.”

“What’s the hold up?” comes a voice from the queue behind her. Seemingly happy to ignore the question, she just continues to look across to Sash as though examining something uninteresting, she’s just had the misfortune to step on.

People tap their toes impatiently. Others drum their fingers on the long since stopped conveyor belt. A child folds his arms, mimicking his scruffily dressed father.

“Let me try again”, Sash says. “It must be a problem with the machine.”

Moving at a snail’s pace, seemingly unaffected by the enormity of the queue that has begun to swell so much it’s now impossible to see the end of it, the assistant rubs her fingers along the black stripe of the credit card and langorously re-swipes it. Any slower and her heart would stop. The till hums. The eyelids blink, out of synchronization. She pauses briefly, like a game show host at the moment before revealing the winner of a year long event.

“Denied”, she says again, emphasizing the first syllable of the word.

Someone’s hands go up in the air. “Come on”, he says. “That’s four times now. It isn’t going to work.”

“Do you have another card?” the assistant asks, handing back her broken one.

Sash looks down at her shopping. A bottle of wine, a pre-packaged salad, a beef steak, a punnet of strawberries, a health food bar to eat on the way home. She rifles through her purse, practically tipping the coins out in front of her to count them.

“This is ridiculous”, the same man from the queue says. Others nod their heads in agreement. One says, mostly to himself, “call the manager already.”

“I have three dollars, eighty six cents”, Sash says, trying her best to follow the assistant’s lead and ignore them.

The assistant looks at the shopping. She looks at Sash and then she looks at the till. “That’s not going to be enough”, she says.

Outside, the sky has clouded over. Sash looks up into the black stormy swirls as though expecting to find a reasonable answer there. Instead, all she gets is a spot of light rain dampening her cheek. She feels like the world is spitting on her.

“Looks like it’s rolling in again”, an old lady says, holding on to her hat while she passes, in case a sudden gust of wind might blow it off.

Sash sighs. “What happened to the fucking sun?” she mumbles, the old lady already out of earshot.

At the entrance to the train station, a dark skinned man taps enthusiastically on upturned plastic buckets with a wooden kitchen spoon.

Sash pauses for a moment to listen, losing herself pleasurably in the hollow, vibrant sounds.