Crack, Smack, Back, Plaque, Whack, Rack, Hack and Nack

Crack, Smack, Back, Plaque, Whack,
    Rack, Hack and Nack
            by Douglasr Eimer

     which word does not fit

In June a transport jumped the median and smashed into Helen Groceteria. Half the box and the back eight wheels stuck out of the building. The driver explained to the owner that he’d been reading. When the owner’s wife was released from hospital in February, she kept the new arrangement at the store where a younger, more energetic female had been doing her former work behind the counter and along the aisles. The owner’s wife began planning new employment for herself. In July, she had an interview with a company that allowed its employees to travel. In August the truck driver was found guilty of gross negligence causing bodily harm and sentenced to one year in prison. That same month the new girl at the store fell off the short ladder and sprained her foot and had to stay home for two weeks. The owner found the load at work very difficult, but his wife would not step back into the place. She unplugged the phone and listened to the messages now and then and returned only those calls she wished to. The owner got his sister from whom he felt distanced to let her thirteen-year old daughter work there for adult wages for the two weeks. She returned to babysitting instead after three days and the owner had to resort to helping himself. The babysitter told her mother that the owner sold dirty magazines under the counter to underage boys. It was true. He sold Playboy magazines and a mild form of Japanese pornography with the text in Japanese. When his sister asked him about them, the owner phoned the magazine distributor next day and cancelled the standing order. The distributor sent him a bill for two thousand dollars plus for lost sales and breech of contract and the owner paid them. The legal hassle, since they had contacted a lawyer about the matter in advance of his payment, caused the company no end of grief and much later bankruptcy. The lawyer spoke to a judge of his acquaintance about the pornographic magazine firm. The judge, in a routine set of judicial orders some weeks later, gave this magazine company as an example of scurrilous values at a political rally. The leadership candidates debated national family mores and the question of sexual corruption of youth by media and business. One of them promised if elected to look into the issues and begin to do something about them, and, in short, ordered an investigation into this company’s holdings. He found, quite by accident and incidentally, that they had defrauded their shareholders. They were ordered by the courts to pay back six million dollars plus fines of another two point four. They declared no contest, closed their doors, and set up business in Texas. The truck driver lost his license to haul freight in May and decided to stay on welfare till he found a new job. The owner's wife sewed doll clothing for a toy store in downtown Toronto and took her ideas from television runway shows. Her doll clothes were risqué and not meant for children. A year later she had made a small name for herself and began to travel to actual fashion shows. She attended one in Paris and another in New York that winter. The mother of the babysitter began to work for the owner since her husband was ill and could no longer regularly appear at the computerized sign company. He’d been employed there for thirteen years. Before that he had also hauled freight by transport. Now he mainly stayed home and lay in bed or watched television in the living room from the couch. His wife looked newly joyful, now that she had work. Till this recent employment she had been a housewife and had grown tired of the business of providing for adolescents. The store owner liked his sister’s work habits and began to feel a renewed interest in his store. He thought of ways of making it pay him better returns, and eventually turned to her for ideas. She had a large store of them and they were of a sort and kind that produced results. Customers flocked in now on days when there used to be half a dozen a morning. In December they began the building of an addition to house the shoe and clothing lines they had taken to selling, and by April it was completed and up and running. The previous February, the husband had died and it took the sister two months of lethargy to return to the energy needed to begin to sell the new products in May.  The owner’s niece began to work for the T. Eaton company on Bellville Avenue and the next year, when she was in grade eleven, she had her first pictures in the store catalogue modelling clothing. That summer she began to pose for photos in a Canadian fashion magazine. She wrote her mother from Sidney next March that she would soon come home for a visit, but she would not be able to finish her high school for another two years. Her priority now, she wrote, was to establish her career while she had the looks and the figure. The store owner broke his leg falling from a ladder and by the following September he had still not fully recovered. He sat in an easy chair in the store while his sister organized, rang up sales, climbed ladders, set up displays and in every way showed him how competent she was at this world of commerce. The truck driver began to think about working again. In October he bought a little quarter ton and by the end of the month was delivering and hauling small items around the city. His first delivery was a gas generator to a small company building homes on the outskirts beyond the power grid. His second and third jobs were more rural and had to do with carting manure to gardens well past the perimeter. By the early months of winter he was busy almost every day without a driver’s license.