We’re all standing around looking confused as an old man with a wooden walking cane knocks down a can of raspberry preserves from the bottom shelf and falls purposefully to his knees and gets down on all wrinkly fours and outs his tongue and his tongue touches the confiture and he begins lapping it up like a stray dog. His breathing radiates across the modestly-sized grocery store and even in the inhibition of the strange indie music the breathing worms its way into our ears and none of the Hawaii-printed shirts turn to him or pay any attention whatsoever as if this is something that has happened before and will happen again.
Some of us choose ignorance and start walking toward the produce touching bundles of bananas and mango orbs as we meander along in the way of others who are also in the way of others who are, by design, in the way of others. There are others, like you, who opt to witness the consummation of the thick jelly by the old man whose chin is now adrift with what looks like crimson bile running from his throat out of a sickly mouth propped open by thin, ghost-like lips, but it’s just raspberries, don’t worry. He stands up with a great struggle and somebody catches his arm as he nearly falls back to his knees and when he notices all of us looking at him he smiles, wipes the jam from his face, says wow good stuff and promptly exits the store into the gunfire soliciting outside the front door.
The music, somehow, becomes louder.
A young boy lies on the ground propped up against the cooler housing spoiling dairy products. Nobody pays him much mind. He appears to be sleeping. One of his arms rests on the edge of the cooler, four-fingered hand open, and your son walks up and gives him a hearty hi-five before you each move on.
We’re now walking along the freezer section which is stocked high with nothing but chicken tikka masala vacuum-sealed in neat little packets that fold over as if whatever is inside is still moving. Because of this everyone gathers around this isle and grabs the prepackaged meals by the dozen until all the chicken tikka masala has disappeared save for the bottom dregs which are covered frothy with a thick layer of freezer-burn. You reach down and pick one up to put it into your tiny cart. It is warmer than you thought it would be.
The old man briefly reappears in the window and looks inward at us and we all try to ignore him as he yells something over the gunshots ringing out muffled, and then he stops, stares directly at you, and something in his eyes quivers as if there’s an eyelash stuck in there that he’s never been able to get out, he begins to weep, and he places his face against the window and the tears run down the glass, shining so starstruck in the hazy sunlight sent foggy by the sheets of smoke that writhe about the still, heatstroke’d air. You turn around because your son wants you to grab him a bag of barbecue chips from the top shelf and when you check back in with the old man he’s disappeared, the only evidence of him remaining the faceprint weirdly greasy splattered crystal-clear on the glass.
You pass a display of wilting flowers resting in cups of filthy water. You take a sad-looking bouquet and think yeah, think this’ll do. She’ll like this.
There’s a mother sitting on the ground, the fresh cuts of salmon rising above her like a god, and she looks up into the oppressively bright overhead lights stringing webs of glare throughout the store, she looks up into them, blinks a few times, and never stops blinking. Her five children push five child-sized grocery carts rambunctiously around the store, knocking into people’s knees, the shelves bruised with their impacts, but nobody seems to mind. Someone laughs as one of the mother’s children runs full-speed across the store and trips over her mother’s outstretched legs. Neither of them seem to mind.
You need cheese. Parmesan cheese. You go to the cheese section and become overwhelmed by the selection of artisan cheeses available so you play this silly game you and your wife used to play where you go to a shelf and if you can’t find what you’re looking for you close your eyes reach out and whatever you grab is what you get. You close your eyes and reach out and grab a strange-feeling tube of something, clasp your hand around it, feel the cold and the wet squelching from within a thick layer of plastic, open your eyes, open your palm, and are severely disappointed with what you now have to purchase. You give it to your son, who has been distracted by a fire that has broken out at a law firm across the street. He takes it, puts it in his mouth, and punctures the plastic with his teeth, sucking the insides of the package into his mouth humming yummy yummy yummy.
Aircraft fly overhead. Your grandfather taught you how to identify certain planes and helicopters by the sound their engines make. You listen close, beyond the music in its ever-increasing volume. Nope. You don’t know that one. Your son tugs on your shirt and wants you to grab a jar of pickled cucumbers from the top shelf. You look at the jar. It’s labeled “pickled cucumbers.” Huh, you think. Those are just pickles. You grab two jars, one for your son and one for you, and he smiles and tells you he loves you and you nearly break down but steel yourself like how your mother told you you had to you take a breath you remember what happens to the weak they become obscure you remember what happens to the souls infertile as she would have called them you remember what happens to those who are ungrateful who are disturbed who are distracted and you take your son’s hand in yours and you say goddamnit I love you too.
Next to you there are three young women all wearing the same cropped top all talking about how they would go about killing a dog. One of them carries a limp roll of celery in her hand.
You have all you need so you stand in the checkout line and all of us see the hummingbirds crash beak-first against the window, spattering it in thick running trails of blood and feathers, some of their bones stick to the gore, and somebody laughs, the same person who laughed earlier, and nobody else says a single thing.
I can help you over here!
The employee is dressed in a ridiculously aggravating floral print of red roses with colorful frogs sitting on their petals. You think that doesn’t make any sense, but pay it no mind as the checkout counter blips electronically with every barcode scan. The employee is assisted by another employee who bags your groceries and who is wearing an equally distasteful outfit, this time paired with denim cargo shorts, its pockets filled to the brim with a leaking fluid that drips onto their Crocs and runs from the rubber onto the floor. There’s a pool of it here, like they haven’t moved once in hours, and you nearly slip in the stuff as you grab the bags and set them quietly into the cart, of which the rust is already beginning to show as birthmarks on the bright red painted metal. After all is said and done the employee ringing you out tells you the total. You reach into your pocket and pull out a handful of kaleidoscopic glass shards, handing them to her as she places them on a scale and examines the weight-in-grams moving slowly upward toward a green digital arrow that flips up and dings when your total is reached. You shove the remainder of the glass back inside your pocket. The scars on your palm still hurt.
Each employee cheerfully orders you to have a great day and suddenly there’s a sea of people who have also finished checking out and all of us are now making our way toward the exit, covering our faces and the faces of our children with the gas masks with hoses protruding from all angles and they all smell of sulfur and everything, if you’re not wearing your government-issued gas mask, without the government-issued gas mask everything, in the end, smells of sulfur. You place the smaller of your two masks over your son’s face and press a rubber button which activates the chloroform-sensitive air filter and lead him, with one hand pushing the deteriorating cart and the other on his back, out to the car. The heat from the fires across the street gash into your skin and the bullets, for now, have ceased their trajectories toward targets vague and unholy. Once the groceries are safely in the backseat you each get into the vehicle and you each sit there in silence for a moment, listening to the world quiet down, the noise of the helicopters above you, the dozens of them, whirring as no more than the sound of a running fan pressing brown noise that helps you fall asleep. After a few minutes, you churn the engine, wait for the oil to warm, and begin driving back to the graveyard. Your son takes the pickled cucumbers out from one of the bags, cracks open the seal, and offers you one with a sticky hand, another gripped steady in his other, the juices dripping onto your passenger seat. You take a bite and realize that maybe there is a difference between pickled cucumbers and pickles after all.
Once on the interstate it seems as if the entire world has stopped once again, and in the trails of engine oil and other such slicks that pool on the shoulder as you evade swarms of burnt abandoned cars, a USPS truck knocked to its side with a disabled body crushed underneath, a minivan packed with refuse put there by somebody trying to hide something, the way the heatwaves in the air flash and whir in your periphery as they bounce from the roofs of the overturned wreckage, as you escape it all you wonder where, in such emptiness, have all your fellow shoppers gone?
You arrive with your son at the graveyard and now stand over a headstone bearing a name so familiar yet strangely foreign to you now. You’ve taken the grocery bags with you, set them down on the fresh grass growing tall and proud from fertile soil. There is no need for the gas masks here. There’s nothing in this air but oxygen, but warmth, but memories. You reach into one of the large paper bags and rifle around and search and search but your mind sways as your hands come up empty. Your son picks up on your nervousness. He asks you what’s wrong. You sigh, defeated, and stare at the headstone with a look in your eye she would never recognize. We forgot the flowers at check-out, you tell him.
Come here.
We have to go back.