Silent Scream of Five Hundred Shopping Carts

That supermarket, named "Yongfu" – Eternal Fortune – ultimately failed to sustain its fortune. Like a weary behemoth stranded on the city's edge, it breathed its last on the day it announced its clearance sale and closure. The air hung heavy with the scent of cheap soap, expired bread, and something deeper, an essence called "despair."

Old Ma, the owner, a small man with graying hair, his spine bent by the weight of life, stood at the entrance, watching the surging crowd. They weren't there to shop, but more like scavengers converging to divvy up the remnants of a corpse. The clearance banners, glaringly red, resembled wounds. A mixture of greed and anxiety flickered in people's eyes, as if every discounted item was treasure salvaged from a shipwreck, capable of keeping them afloat just a moment longer in these hard times.

Three days. Just three days, and the shelves were bare, leaving only a few unwanted, damaged orphans. The clamor subsided, replaced by wreckage and a deathly silence. Old Ma, dragging his exhausted body, prepared to inventory what was left. He walked to the large metal shelter outside where the shopping carts were once parked.

Then, he froze.

The shelter was empty. No, not entirely empty. In a corner lay two or three askew, wheels missing, wire baskets twisted like dying beetles. But the rest, the more than five hundred carts that should have been neatly lined up, waiting, were gone. As if swallowed by the night, or swept away by a silent hurricane.

Over five hundred! The number struck Old Ma's heart like a cold nail. These weren't just five hundred lumps of metal; they were his painstakingly accumulated assets, the lifeblood of the supermarket's operation, the mobile hands of his customers. He rushed back into the cavernous supermarket, roaring at the empty shelves, his voice echoing, sounding so small and helpless in the vast space. His anger surged like a tide, only to be quickly replaced by a deeper, colder bewilderment.

Who did it?

The question circled in Old Ma's mind like a buzzing fly. Was it looters taking advantage of the chaos? An organized gang of thieves? He couldn't fathom how over five hundred clanging shopping carts could vanish from the city streets like ghosts, without a trace. It was a Kafkaesque absurdity, happening to him, this insignificant city dweller.

He reported it to the police. The police came, took notes, wrote down "Over 500 shopping carts, stolen" in their notebooks, then shrugged, offered a few perfunctory "We'll look into it," and left. There was no surprise in their eyes, only the weariness common after witnessing the bizarre realities of the city's underbelly. It was as if what was lost wasn't five hundred shopping carts, but five hundred fallen leaves.

Days turned into weeks, the carts did not return. Old Ma wandered like a потерявший душу (lost soul) through the empty supermarket. His anger had faded, replaced by a bone-deep melancholy. He began to roam the city's corners, as if searching for lost children.

Then, he began to see them.

Not all at once, but fragments, scattered within the city's fabric.

In a dilapidated residential area, he saw an old woman, her back bent, pushing scavenged scraps in a Yongfu supermarket cart. The wheels squeaked, as if groaning. The supermarket logo on the side was caked with mud, but Old Ma recognized it instantly. He wanted to approach, to question her, but looking at her face, etched with the deep lines of age and poverty, he opened his mouth and said nothing. In her hands, the cart was no longer supermarket property; it was the sole crutch supporting her heavy life.

Under an overpass, several homeless men huddled around a makeshift stove fashioned from a shopping cart. Flames licked at the wire basket, illuminating their numb, vacant faces. The cart, which once held an abundance of goods, now contained the only warmth against the cold night.

Beside a dusty construction site, a young mother pushed her child in a shopping cart. The child slept soundly inside, nestled on worn cotton padding. A few cheap toys were tucked in a corner. The cart had become a temporary cradle, carrying the meager hopes of a family on the margins.

He also saw carts used to transport heavy gas canisters, repurposed as temporary vegetable stalls, even dismantled for parts, merging with other discarded items into the city's heaps of refuse.

They hadn't been spirited away by some shadowy mastermind; they had been taken, quietly and dispersedly, by countless desperate hands during the chaos of the 'clearance sale'. They weren't taken by greedy thieves, but by poverty itself. By those pushed to the fringes of life, instinctively grabbing anything usable from the supermarket's carcass, like drowning men clutching at floating planks.

The disappearance of the five hundred carts was not a simple case of theft. It was a silent, collective cry. An absurd tableau formed by the survival struggles of countless individuals in the neglected corners of this city. Like dandelion seeds carried by the wind, they scattered, bearing the supermarket's imprint, landing in every nook and cranny of the city, taking root, and continuing to 'serve'—in a twisted yet tenacious way—those forgotten by commercial civilization.

Old Ma stood on a street corner, watching a familiar cart scrape by, emitting a harsh grating sound. He suddenly understood. These five hundred carts weren't truly 'lost'. They had simply merged, in another form, into the flesh and blood of the city, becoming an indispensable part of the landscape of life at the bottom. Their disappearance testified more profoundly, more disturbingly, to certain truths than their presence ever could.

The sky was overcast, like a vast, dirty rag. Old Ma turned, his stooped figure disappearing into the flow of people. The clamor and silence of those five hundred shopping carts would forever be etched in his memory, and upon the hidden scars of this city. They are a footnote to this era, humble yet heavy proof of the existence of countless voiceless ones beneath the veneer of prosperity.