Empty shelves, Heart full of hate.

By David Waldron Anderson

I walked through the Walgreens doors expecting nothing more than a quick errand. A couple of items, in and out. But the shelves told another story half-empty, whole aisles picked clean, the store looking like it had survived a storm.

At the end of one aisle, a young woman in a Walgreens vest was crouched low, stacking odds and ends. A fat four-color pen hung from her mouth like a cigarette the plastic barrel gnawed down to jagged edges. She bit it like it had wronged her, grinding at it with her teeth as she worked.

Trying to be polite, I said, almost casually, “Hey, the shelves look really depleted like the place has been looted.”

Not a word. Not even a glance.

She rose slowly, the pen still clamped between her teeth, and turned toward me. Her eyes found mine, and they locked, two cold, venomous daggers. The look wasn’t just unfriendly; it was accusatory, like she’d already decided I was guilty of something.

No hello. No nod. No nothing. She stalked toward the register with the same pen jammed between her teeth, calling halfheartedly for another employee who didn’t answer.

I followed to the counter, still trying to make light of the silence. “Did you hear me? I said hello.”

That’s when she bared her teeth, spoke with the pen in her mouth and said, “You’re not entitled to have me respond to you just because you speak to me.”

The words dripped hatred.

I blinked, caught off guard. “Well, it’s just a greeting. We’re in the same community.”

Her smirk curled tighter. Her eyes never softened. “We’re not in the same community.”

“We’re standing right next to each other,” I said, almost laughing at the absurdity. “That makes us a community, at least for this moment.”

But her stare didn’t break. Her voice, low and flat, came again: “You’re not entitled to anything from me.”

That’s when I noticed her face more fully. On one cheek, tattooed in bold ink, an obscene word spelled out like a battle flag. On the other cheek, a giant “U,” as if the rest of the sentence—you know what—was meant to hang unspoken in the air. Around them, more ink, more marks. Her face itself was a wall, and the writing on it made her position plain: hostility first, humanity later.

And maybe it wasn’t only the ink. When she looked up at me, I could almost see her mind working. I get told all the time that I look like Donald Trump so maybe she decided, in that instant, that I was him in spirit if not in name. And from there, the hostility poured out on autopilot. (I suppose I should take it as a compliment; not many people get mistaken for a president while buying toothpaste at Walgreens.)

The checkout was no better. When my card glitched on the first try, she didn’t wait, didn’t ask, she grabbed my bag and yanked it aside, glaring at me like I was about to bolt for the door. When the second attempt cleared, she let go reluctantly, still smirking, her eyes boring into me as if she would have loved to find me in the wrong.

I walked out with my bag, but her stare followed me, out of the store.

It made me wonder: what had hardened her like that? What kind of life had carved into her the conviction that even a simple hello was an act of entitlement?

A greeting costs nothing. Yet with her, the price was hostility, smirk included.

And sometimes the most barren shelves aren’t the ones in the store, they’re the ones in the human heart.