Cynthia Rylant Checkouts

“Checkouts”

“Checkouts”, a short story by Cynthia Rylant, is about a girl who moves from a small town to a large city, Cincinnati. She doesn’t want to move, she sees it as her parents taking her away from the life she knows and loves and that they’re not letting her finish growing up as a child. Throughout the story, the word “checkouts” is used in multiple different ways, such as the boy works at a checkout line in a supermarket, the girl “checks out” from the world while in the supermarket and they check each other out at the checkout line. For example, “once inside the supermarket, her hands firmly around the handle of the cart, she would lapse into a kind of reverie” (Rylant 24). Shows that the girl sees grocery shopping as an escape from the world, as a way to take her mind off the negatives in her life.
The

The third and final way the word checkouts is represented is that the boy worked in a checkout line. He had just recently started his job when the girl appeared, “He was nervous- first day on the job- and along had come this fascinating girl” (Rylant 25). As if he wasn’t worried enough about having started a new job, and wanting to make a good first impression, with his falling hair and tattered shoes, there was someone else he wanted to impress now, this girl. After dropping the mayonnaise, he felt intimidated by his surroundings, “the cocky cashier at the register, the grim and hairy store manager, the the bland butcher, and the brazen bag boys” (page 25). All these people were above him in the boy’s eyes. All-in-all the boy and the girl do love each other, and even when they saw each other at the movie, there was still something there. Although they were with separate people, there was still a