Grocery Store

By Annika Finne

 

 

Your initial assumption is incorrect—that girl didn’t come here for food. Standing in aisle three, she feels the small thrill of being secretly unique. No one else in the store knows why she has come. They are thinking: apple season, 2.99 per pound, these refrigerators are making my nipples stand on end, I hope no one notices. They do the circuit: lettuce, vegetables, meat, cheese, milk, bread, cookies, debit or credit. Halloween decorations sparkle, oblivious of their impending irrelevance. The man pretending to look at toothbrushes is really picking out hemorrhoid cream. At two on a Wednesday the bustling hordes have not yet arrived. Gracie the bagger waits for her break, thinking of herself as rather less than a person. Having recently quit his menial job, Jack looks into her eyes and remembers how easy it is to lose every shimmer of pride and self respect. The girl in aisle three examines the minestrone selection.

 

Aisle three is canned foods. There is enough to weather any sort of disaster, for a time. It is plausible, she thinks, that a catastrophe could happen today, the world is so heavy with rain, a big soggy balloon waiting to be split open. We would need this shelter until we could recoup our losses and travel south to a more logical living location, she thinks. The cans go eight deep. There are roughly eighty people in the store. If the predicted earthquake hit, maybe ten percent would die on impact, leaving seventy two survivors. She thinks about how long she would have to be eating lentils, assuming that the store was the only one spared in all of Seattle. It would be kind of nice to be thrown together with a bunch of strangers in a struggle to survive. I wouldn’t mind propagating the human race with him, she thinks. And that woman with white hair and a blue bonnet bending over the tortilla chips, she and I would be like mother and daughter, after a time.

 

         She had read in a magazine that refugees from developing countries were terrified and shocked by the sumptuous swathes of water spurting from our taps, by our hoards of food. Really, she thinks, all we need are lentils. Everything went terribly wrong when all of a sudden we became obligated to do more than just survive and carry on the species. The woman in tight black yoga pants has been wondering all day whether she has been the object of more silent fantasies since the lipo. The girl considers the older woman and she is not the only one watching her move confidently around the store, spandex expanding and contracting. You have to admire her pragmatism, her willingness to subscribe wholeheartedly to our cultural standards. The girl feels a rush of affection.

 

         Leaving the store she thinks about how hungry she has become, standing and looking at soup. They are all hungry, in there—the older man perusing the magazine rack, the young woman selecting a dried corn bouquet, the couple arguing over the glucose content of Triscuits, the child begging his mother for chocolate walnut chunk cookies. They don’t speak to each other, but they move in sync—slouched shoulders, a shuffling walk, a long suffering gaze. Outside the dark pushes them all into the store, these little islands of people bumping around cheese arrays and selecting microwave meals. She smiles a little half smile as she shuffles to her car, suddenly warmed by how simple it is sometimes, being a person.

 

          Author’s Bio: Annika Finne is a sophomore at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She is from Seattle and her writing has previously appeared in the student run literary journal Ostranenie.