Numbers and Prices

Story · all 20 words

The First Day at the Till

My first job was in my uncle’s shop, and I was fifteen. He put me behind the till on a Thursday morning and gave me exactly one rule: “Count the change twice, and always say the total out loud before you take any money.”

The first customer was an old man with three bottles of oil. The price was two dinars each. He asked me how much it was, and my head went completely empty – zero, nothing, not one number in it. He waited, then said “six” very kindly and put the cash on the counter.

The second customer was a woman with a long list and many questions. Why was the rice more expensive than last month? Was there a discount on the big bags? Was the small bag cheap because it was old? She bought half a kilo of dates and paid with a hundred-dinar note, which is a hard thing to do to a fifteen-year-old before ten in the morning.

The third customer was a boy of about six. He put one sweet on the counter and looked up at me without speaking. It cost ten piastres. He had five in his hand. I looked at the door, then at the sweet, then at him. “Today it is free,” I said, and he ran out before I could change my mind.

At the end of the day my uncle counted everything and wrote the number in a big black book. In good years, he told me, that book had days with three thousand in them. Today it was forty dinars, and to me that felt like a million. Then he stopped and looked at one line. “Ten piastres are missing,” he said. He did not ask me where they went, and I did not tell him, and I never had to pay them back.