In hindsight, I wondered if Marge was telepathically receiving my violent fantasies. Was this my fault? I remember trying to turn a light bulb on with my thoughts when I was a kid—not even a flicker. But that doesn’t mean telekinesis or ESP don’t exist.
The parking lot is vast, almost hazy in the distance. Easily seen from space by cosmonauts. One of those big box stores. I mentally notate Row 11, or later it’s the shopping cart rumba and the key fob beep-beep. I’m glad I did. Shopping is dangerous.
I notice the weight of Marge’s purse hoisting it through a dusty bar of sunlight from the backseat of our brown Bonneville. Something heavy shifts. I presume a roll of quarters. “You going to the laundromat?”
“I might… Thanks.” Marge is your typical old lady, but her fiery blue eyes say something different. Me, I’m Mr. Nothing without her. A lot of my anger comes from that psychological relic—passive/aggressive. I don’t know what the big brains call it now.
We get through the electric swing of the door. “What if it went up like a guillotine, Marge?” Why did I always have such disturbing thoughts?
“What if it folded itself like a paper airplane and flew over a pot field, Don?”
“Ha, that’s nutty, Marge.” Here comes the wink and the smile. I love that.
I hadn’t masked up in a while, but she could read me. I was still worried about the bat flu. “Come on, Don.” Marge always uses a cart if she needs one or not. Of course, it’s a front-wheel squeaker.
I categorize shoppers. There’s the plower, who won’t yield or stop. Here comes one wearing Clark Kent glasses, sweat, and swinging puffy white arms. I step aside as Marge searches the noodles for a chicken casserole. I moved quickly and felt like he intimidated me. We walk by him; I square up—bring it, bitch. He craw-fishes his cart doing a 180. Marge says, “Excuse me.” Just as pleasant as can be. He says nothing. I have a lock blade knife and I imagine grabbing a fistful of hair and cutting his throat ear to ear, but we move on.
Marge gives me an odd smile. I swear she read my mind and approved.
We head to the frozen food cases. “The Talkers” are blocking the aisle. The Talkers beat the words back and forth, fat lips running about the bat flu, but don’t social distance. I want to slam the steel cart into them… Watch the blood run! Keep plowing like a maniac driver. My shirt rising, white elastic Depends showing, hunched over like Igor running a cart of body parts to Dr. Frankenstein. I see a cagey gleam in Marge’s eye. I get the sense Marge is seeing this, too, or maybe it’s the scowl hanging on my face with wrinkles deep as dimes.
“Excuse me,” says Marge. The clear voice of reason. “Make way for the old folks, please…” I laugh. She is so brave. The two thirty-ish women dressed in identical skin-tight black yoga pants gawk at us, long eyelashes like tentacles, searching for a weakness. They think it’s their world now, and we should just dry up and blow away. A little boy says. “Move, Mom.” They grudgingly click back.
“Thank you, young man.” Marge, smiling, dismissing the two women as if they were invisible.
“You are welcome, Mam.” His blond head tilts up, and he beams at Marge. Some say the kids of today are monsters, but that boy took me a long way toward restoring the faith.
The women go right back to blocking the aisle like a kind of memory foam. The cart squeaks by the Hungry Man Dinners. “Women get hungry, too,” says Marge.
I feel a grungy couple on our six. Creeping like slow-sin by the cold oranges. Meth heads with the itchy, popping skin and no money. I am always making these judgments.
They assume we are the sick ones in the herd. To be picked off, these predators come in jeans and long T-shirts, don’t let them fool you, with their fevered, “How ya doin, Pops?” They’d be happy to stomp the wallet out of my old checkered slacks. People eat people every day. Don’t ya know?
I turn around fast, and they are gone. “Slippery ass spooks!”
“They were just a couple of poor folks, Don,” says Marge. I search her face for recognition. Did she see the image of the meth heads kicking the dog shit out of me? I guess not.
Back in hindsight mode (BIHM)… What if Marge was the one who could turn on the light bulb with her mind? It might explain the events of that day. My mind opens to her like a dirty movie theater, and she has a free pass. Sitting in the dark corner, never missing a new feature of my madness. A condescending eye roll, an unrequited wave, a tailgater… Blown to pieces with a shotgun. Killing my neighbor again for spraying weed killer on the flowers. The evil thoughts I have about everyone, even Marge, but there’s genuine love there, too. The cross wavering over me. Like gas shimmering on the sidewalk. I’m a good person is my mantra, I would never do these things. Maybe I corrupted her? Eh, probably never know on this side of the grave.
Something like an elementary school playground is coming our way, past the thick smell of Maxwell coffee, spilled in the aisle. A woman with her hair pulled back, wearing a skimpy top, midriff showing, fat hanging over tight yellow shorts, seems like she is on a cattle drive. Losing control of five dirty brats screaming at the top of their lungs. “Put those Oreos back, Quentin, you little bastard!” She smacks one across the face. Marge halts the cart.
“Come on, Marge, we don’t need this shit,” then I added. “Please.”
Marge stares daggers at the woman, but I want to give her a high five. Those little rug rats got in line—quick. My mom was a great hair puller and face slapper, and I deserved it every time.
Then we were over in the potato chip land of the crispy, zesty, BBQ, jalapeno, and all the rest. Here comes a “Phoner.” I like the Phoners the best, who walk like Buddhist monks looking down, texting. They are swimming in isolation, harmless as goldfish. And forget about any manners from the Phoners. “Excuse me,” I say to a mop of dark, misanthropic hair looking down.
After a long, squeaky search for the staples: pop, Italian bread, 2% milk, brown eggs, Marge loves the golden yokes. The cart is filling up, listing to the right. I see impatience on Marge, and she feels mine on our Siamese twin nervous system of a forty-year marriage. The outrageous prices bedraggle us—hello inflation—goodbye chuck roast! The bat flu’s excuse to hyper-inflate groceries. Only two lanes open, taking cash. A long line under the glare of the fluorescent lights exhausts us.
Getting closer, but the Grabbers are starting in, going for impulse items like chum bait for sharks. Another lousy category overlapping several categories. A black hand snatches a pack of Jack’s Jerky off the rack, right in front of me, and this is still in the social distancing phase. I touch my knife and think of cutting a red, curly-haired forearm, rudely swiping at my crotch for an Almond Joy—sinking the blade. I want to fucking kill someone.
Marge looks at me, then glances at my slacks pocket where my knife is, and nods like Yeah, carve ’em, Don.
There are two types of shoppers. I don’t like to discuss. Not true. I’m always discussing them.
The Contagions are a broad category: the bat flu hackers, Monkey-pox seepers, and meth-head sore-scratchers. These can be hard to circumvent. Dodging a hacker can drive you smack into a scratcher or slap skin with a seeper—all terrible. They should delouse certain people at the door and force them to swim through a moat of peroxide.
The last category of shopper isn’t a shopper at all. He is almost always a—HE. Young, white, might be half Hispanic. The dead-eyed ones on the news. The Actives. I think of several recent mass shootings, mixing up the sequence of events. There are so many! I’m always listening for a distant “Pop… Pop-Pop-Pop!” I imagine it erupting at any moment, like in some war movie, knowing it never will, until it does.
Back in Hindsight Mode (BIHM). I wonder if Marge pulled up a chair to this roaring campfire of fear eating inside my head? Or is it just the terroristic reality of life in America that everyone feels?
Finally, the checkout belt of bacteria is ours. We unload the cart—teamwork.
“Here, Marge.” Fat pork chops.
“Thanks, Don,” Splat.
“Here, Marge.” One gallon of Prairie Farms 2% milk.
“Thanks, ugh, Don.” Clunk.
The checkout girl went too fast, like a carnival huckster, and the monitor was pointing backward, running like the Nasdaq Index. The stock is rising.
We stood off to the side with a cart full of plastic ocean-clogging sacks of groceries in some nowhere land between the register and the exit. Marge, with her glasses riding low, scans the receipt and finds two mistakes. “That little bitch charged us 7.99 for 3 lbs of potatoes, and the 7UPs were 2 for $4… Look Don, 6.48!”
The teenage check-out girl dismisses us with a nervous laugh, then tries to get a manager, and finally points toward customer service on the distant horizon. “Sorry-sorry!” I feel bad for her.
Customer service, as we know, was in the back. Designed this way, so old people and lazy people will keep their overcharged groceries and shoddy electronics that stop working as soon as their ass hits the recliner. Who wants to walk a mile back there? Marge’s hip is bad, and she refuses to ride the electric cart. I want to ride one, liking any artificial propulsion system, but we are a couple and one does not break etiquette.
“Fucking bullshit!”
“Double fuck!” says Marge. Now we are on a mission. The prices are outrageous to start with, and we are on a fixed income. Do the stores ever consider our valuable time, slipping away to nothing as it is, penny pitching, and coupon snipping? Add another half hour of bullshit. The store rarely made mistakes in our favor—any store. When they did, I would say to Marge. “Screw them,” and she would smile.
Stranded at customer service. Another line. Then a curling finger. “You.” The face is youthful. The face is stony with black, almost blue whisker stubs. Did I sneer at the elderly? Did I call my elders, you or man, or bro or bitch? Well, bitch—definitely. I hate their locomotion of youth. He stares at his screen, like he forgot he just beckoned us.
The evil thoughts start…I’m shooting, stabbing, stapling eyelids, skinning, blow torching, burning him alive with gas…
“Can you help us?” I say.
“Help?”
“Yes, you see us here, right?” says Marge.
“No, I don’t see you at all.”
The long countertop of bureaucracy stood between us. Designed to stand a foot higher. Like we were going up to a higher power, hat in hand. Please beg your pardon, oh, sir. Sorry to report that you have screwed us over again. Grasping the receipt.
The kid had one of those puffy faces, but a malevolent intelligence rode under it. A plastic blue tag on his chest said, Joel. Joel looked at his phone and laughed. Marge had a strange smile playing on her once beautiful face, beautiful to me, even after forty years. I still can’t believe I am with such a creature.
I know her dangerous smile means trouble, but I could never have comprehended the extent of it. I thought the rules of married life were concrete and would not allow unpredictable outcomes. We both know the limits of our anger and I’m the worst of us, or so I thought… Of course, it’s the outlier of behavior that’s unpredictable concerning the human animal, even if she is a beautiful little silver-haired old lady with a bad hip and granny glasses.
I look at Marge. Her little hand with age spots holds a large Colt APC .45. The blued barrel is gleaming with gun oil and marred with her fingerprints, and pointing upwards toward his stomach.
“Do you see us now?”
He looks up from his phone, still smiling at whatever is funny. In a nanosecond, the deafening explosion ejects a hot shell off my cheek, lifts him like he is growing, rains fluorescent glass, darkens us, and opens a sparkle of sunlight in the ceiling.
“Marge!” I can’t say anything else through the gun smoke. Blood and shit is in the air. All my words are bottled up in my throat. The blast is ringing in my ears. I rub blood on my cheek. Pistols, I learn, don’t sound like a “Pop” at all. Pops don’t blow your eardrums. Customers are scrambling into the bathroom. An alarm whoops like a tornado siren.
“Let’s go!” Her voice snaps me to reality. She leads the way to the car. The gun down to her side, limping. She points it at Clark Kent and he flies into a bunch of Life cereal boxes. I follow like a dutiful servant. Understanding that our partnership has taken a very loud power shift.
“ATTENTION-ATTENTION-ATTENTION ACTIVE SHOOTER!” blares over the intercom. The thing that will never happen, like winning the Powerball. Does! Outside I hear more sirens. Where’s the car? What row?
Back in Hindsight Mode (BIHM), we should have parked closer.
Image: A supermarket aisle seen from the POV of inside a shopping trolley. From pixabay.com
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