Hello Kitty
Moreno Valley is brown, hot, and sixty miles wide. Living there as a teenager was hellish: isolated and isolating. Summers were by far the worst, with routine daily temperatures over 110° Fahrenheit. We were hours from the beach, marooned, desolate. Arrakis with no spice, no worm.
A good job was any place with air conditioning. While I was working at Home Depot under the chug of swamp coolers and a continual snow of sawdust, my little sister got a job in the blessedly cool Moreno Valley mall. It was easy, she told me. She didn't have to balance a till or load concrete into trucks. All she had to do was wear a zip-up Hello Kitty costume and giant spherical head at the Sanrio store.
It paid minimum wage, but so did everything else.
On a day that was fast approaching 120° at noon, the power went out all over town. The mall had enough generator power to keep the lights on and the cash registers running, but the industrial chugging AC shut off. A few blocks away, my colleagues and I were writing out sales slips in the sunroof semidarkness, penciling down SKUs and making change for cash customers. My sister took off her giant head, assuming they'd send her home.
They did not.
Heat of that magnitude will always win. Without a mechanical means of keeping cool, there is nothing anyone can do. It rose in sickening waves off the pavement, came creeping in every door and every vent, filling the building. At Home Depot, we kept bags of a special absorbent compound in case someone spilled paint or oil on the floor. That day, we were using it to clean up vomit as one by one, the young and old succumbed to the heat.
Parents who should have known better were determined to finish their errands, dragging kids through the mall and the home improvement warehouse store, refusing to surrender. My sister, inside her kitty costume with its fur like carpet, with its head like a stockpot, was beginning to boil. Children with red faces cried and screamed at her, kicked her in the shins. They had no delight for mascots under this amount of stress.
She asked again to go home. Her boss, running a till and counting the customers in line to whom a Keropi eraser was a legitimate emergency, said no.
Kids began to barf on Hello Kitty. They did it standing feet away, or holding on to her feverish legs. They did it while crying, while apologizing. The mall skylights baked from above. The heat rushed in from the foodcourt, scented with oranges chicken and Julius.
Like besieged Roman commanders, my sister's boss, my Home Depot shift manager, commanded us to hold the line.
When the interior temperature reached the triple digit mark, the brownout ended. AC and swamp cooler began the herculean task of bringing down the midday heat, accumulated in all our pits and pockets, pressurizing the buildings all at once with their powerful wheeze.
My sister turned her face away from the eyeholes in her mask and vomited into the capacious cheek of Hello Kitty. My Home Depot's lighting department quietly overloaded the display's circuits and the racks of lamps and ceiling fans caught fire, stinking of ozone and melting plastic.
Both of us clocked out at our scheduled shifts' end that day.
https://ko-fi.com/melison