“Black Sheep”
Handing the customer their change, Tanya said, “Thank you.”
She turned to the next customer, and saw it was a guy wearing a t-shirt reading, “I’m not a sheep!” Tanya sighed, and started ringing up his items.
“You read my shirt?” the guy asked.
“Yeah.”
With an audible sneer, the guy then asked, “Does it bother you?”
Tanya chuckled. “It’s been my experience that 99% of guys who buy shirts like that don’t understand the message.”
For a few seconds there was silence, then the guy said, “The message is pretty obvious.”
“Yeah. But a lot of people still don’t get it.”
“And what do you think the message is?”
“Well, my experience is that the people who bought shirts like that thought people like me who listened to doctors and health professionals during a pandemic were ‘sheep,’ but they were smart because they listened to crazed, conspiracy nuts. But what can we expect from people who loudly state they are against ‘going with the herd,’ only for most of them to take joy in making life a living hell for anyone they consider ‘black sheep’ of society. Be they black, or trans, or female, or socialist, or not born in America, or whatever.”
Tanya finished ringing up his items and looked at the guy. “People are all different. But accepting those that are different is woke. So you have all these people screaming that they are not sheep, while also demanding that everyone around them be identical in their beliefs like some … uniform herd animal.”
For a moment, the guy stood there with a bit of a confused look on his face.
“That will be $17.42,” Tanya said.
Go back to the main Monthly Story page, or the main page of my website.
For each story I publish, I like to give the backstory, or anything interesting that happened while writing it. You can see what I wrote for this story on my Published Works page.
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If you liked this story, you might want to check out Useless Cogs, my collection of forty, science fiction stories.
