Invisible Ellen Read Online Free

lucky to walk away unnoticed, so she didn’t dare another. The possibility of being mocked or insulted in that rasping language required more fortitude than she could muster, ever. She reassured herself with the thought that soon enough she would be at work, the megasource for her dietary staples: processed snack foods. Turning, she headed back to the bus stop and caught the next number 12 bus after a short wait.
    But this time Ellen found herself unable to perceive the other commuters with her usual emotional detachment, reducing them to illustrations in her personal comic book. She still studied them. A man in a suit was tapping his fingers nervously, a small hopeful smile playing across his mouth, and Ellen found herself wondering why he was smiling. Was he hoping something at work would get him noticed? Was he on his way to meet someone? A frightened-looking woman across from him, who constantly checked her silent cell phone, might have a child who was late coming home. Ellen was unclear on why these new, intrusive thoughts nagged at and unsettled her, but she did not like them. Ellen had always thought of the vignettes she loved to witness as her personal Polaroids, snapshots for a scrapbook without backstory or consequence. Return without investment.
    Before the adrenaline surging through her body had a chance to release her from its barbed-wire grip, she reached her stop. She disembarked and headed across a parking lot the size of Rhode Island, then around the side of the giant block of a building. It was a quarter-mile hike that brought her, sweaty and gasping, to the loading docks. As usual, a massive semi was disgorging its contents and it was easy to slip up the access ramp, slink past the dockworkers, through the incessant
beep-beep
of the forklifts, and into the break room.
    Two hairy men in jumpsuits sat at a table, drinking sodas and eating MoonPies, a treat that made Ellen’s mouth water. Standing over them was a dark-skinned man in a cheap suit. His thinning hair was combed across the top of his head. This was Ellen’s immediate supervisor, the night shift manager known as “the Boss.” The title was an affectation he insisted his employees use to address him, something that thankfully Ellen, hired before his transfer to their store, had been able to avoid for four years. The three men glanced up as the door opened, blinked twice, then turned back to their conversation. The Boss was recounting a sexual conquest so lurid in detail that it would have earned him a slap from a hooker. As she passed them, Ellen heard the phrase “banged that bearded clam.” Containing the sneering laughs of the men and the ugly pictures the phrase had summoned in her mind by mentally backing the images into a heavy metal cage with a bullwhip, she slipped through the door to the ladies’ locker room, a square affair with a block of lockers in the center and benches along the walls around them on three sides. The fourth wall opened onto a restroom and a shower area.
    Ellen went to her locker, dumped in her bag, took out the apron and rubber gloves that she kept there for her personal use, and then sat waiting for the men outside to disperse. The door swung open again, letting wisps of obscenity and laughter slip into thelocker room along with a young Russian woman named Irena. The recent and perpetually terrified immigrant scuttled away from the lewd catcalls behind her, keeping her eyes down, and hurriedly gathered her things. She pulled out a battered CD player that she always carried and stuck the frayed earbuds into her ears. Ellen didn’t understand why. She assumed that the music was one way to block out the world, and she could certainly understand Irena’s desire to do exactly that, but for a frightened woman to not be able to hear what was going on around her seemed like an ill-advised choice. Yet when Irena opened the locker room door and was forced to pass back by the offensive trio,