42 Dreams of Arizona Bay

The shopping cart, like many of its siblings, feels a need to exploring the world. It is a young cart, fresh and clean. It lived at the grocery store, but being put into the corral, day in, day out, seemed so tedious to it. Much in the same way that a late 20-something office worker feels the need to leave the place she has always known to explore a scary new place on the other side of the country.
The cart wants to see something new, even if it’s just streets or bus stops.
What the cart doesn’t know is that the world outside of the grocery store is very much like the world inside the grocery store. The scenery is different but the result is the same.
The cart eventually loses motility, gets stuck where it has been left, to the mercy of the shopper bringing home groceries.
Perhaps the young cart would like to rest a while, anyway. No more kids throwing things in, or mothers yelling no. No discarded fliers sitting at the bottom.
The traveling grocery cart doesn’t understand that one place is much like another. Perhaps it gets lonely. It doesn’t always see other carts.
But it greets them, as one passes by, like a long lost friend.
Tell me, Long’s, the Save Mart cart might say… what’s it like back home?
I don’t know, Long’s says, I haven’t been home in several months. I miss it there. Occasionally, we could go inside. And someone would fix my wheels. I gotta tell you, Save Mart, being on the outside wasn’t as nice as I’d hoped. Sometimes people put stuff in me that smells. I’m all sticky!
But then Long’s passes out of the hearing of Save Mart, and the younger cart is lonely again.