THE AMERICAN SUPERMARKET

a short story I'm proud of

Hi all,

I wrote this short story a few months ago and I’m proud of it. If you take the time to read it, thank you! Let me know your thoughts.

Love, Jillian

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Every trip to The American Supermarket begins with a look at the produce. It is the first thing my fellow patrons and I see after those glass doors slide open. My cart has a lagging wheel today so I have to physically correct it by pushing the left side harder than the right. The cheapest produce is almost always the apples and the bananas. The same advertiser who got America hooked on cigarettes got us hooked on the banana. All that unsavory history. I eat a banana almost every day. I like to break off bite-sized bits with my fingers because it makes me feel chic and then it doesn’t look like I’m giving head. I’ve never thought that when I’ve seen someone else eat a banana by putting it directly into their mouth, but there was a time when a lot of banana dick jokes went around and they still rattle in my head. The only hot boy in the produce section has a girlfriend. I know this because they’re shopping together. He’s pushing the cart, she’s pointing and asking.

It is the middle of winter. There are seven varieties of apples to choose from, eleven if you count the organic. Their waxy skins glow pink with yellow streaks, ruby red, green like taffy. Each apple I select to purchase is firm and fits perfectly into the palm of my hand. All of the apples are firm and fit perfectly into the palm of my hand.

It is the middle of winter. The bananas are generally unbruised. You can buy a bunch that’s a little bit greener, if you’re not wanting to eat them right away, or perfectly yellow, or with a few brown spots, if that’s more your taste. Or even, a few of each. You get to play God in The American Supermarket.

It is the middle of winter and you can buy oranges and cherries, grapes, kale, broccoli, zucchini, tomatoes, peaches, pears, raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, mangos and pineapple, coconut and kiwi, clumps of herbs and stubs of ginger at The American Supermarket. All of it as fresh and perfect as a newborn. I worked on a farm last summer and when I saw the season’s first fully ripe tomato, hanging on its vine, it looked just like the ones in the supermarket. Except it was not in a pile of other ripe tomatoes. It was shining red in a tangle of green vines. It was a jewel. It was warm from the sun, as was I. Now the tomatoes are cold and I am cold. It is always cold in The American Supermarket.

Then there’s the bakery bread. I will buy a loaf of sourdough bread and keep it in my refrigerator. I will tell you my grocery list so you can try to figure out the type of person I am. Jk. I don’t buy meat from the supermarket. But I don’t mind looking at it and thinking about it and getting grossed out. Some food objects are harder to divorce from nature than others. I think about animals living terrible violent cramped smelly small painful sick man-handled lives and dying quick mechanical impersonal undignified deaths. And then getting chopped up as meat, and packaged who knows where, and shipped who knows when, to be sold for too much money when it’s not fresh real rich clean or good in any way. I think about all of that.

In the normal bread aisle I think about immorality. About my skin never wrinkling, staying supple and smooth like Wonderbread forever and ever. Wonderbread is a romantic symbol for all highly-processed bread food objects, which constitutes the vast majority of this aisle. Little Debbie is good and cute. Starcrunch and Nutty Buddys and Oatmeal Creme Pies and Zebra Cakes are good and cute. Boys in third grade liked Cosmic Brownies. One friend’s mom bought Swiss Rolls. Who cared about Honey Buns. And Hostess could get fucked. Twinkies make you fat. I want to stay thin and young forever and ever. And I can, in aisles of The American Supermarket.

The sun does not rise or set in the supermarket. From 6am to 11pm, 365 days a year, the sun hangs high and ripe. It has been bottled and preserved so it may illuminate one hundred varieties of mustard and one hundred varieties of pasta sauce from 6am to 11pm, 365 days a year. Time stills his anxious hands under the flat white glow of this preserved sun. This is to say the clock stops ticking. This is to say the supermarket is a timeless space. Nothing ages, nothing expires, nothing rots. In these aisles I will not age, I will not expire, I will not rot. I will live forever as royalty, sampling so many varieties of mustard. Sampling pickles, pearl onions, Bonne Maman jam, little sausages, manchego cheese, chocolate covered almonds, Ritz crackers forever and ever.

I shove the lopsided cart up and down, up and down the scuffed white linoleum tile. You are what you eat. I am Honey Nut Cheerios. That’s a classy fucking cereal right there. Imagine if I said I was Cap’n Crunch, or Coco Puffs. You might imagine a girl who keeps dirty plates in her room and lets crumbs collect in her sheets. I do not do these things. I write to do lists in my journal which is actually a diary. I go to yoga class. Sometimes I put banana slices on top of my Honey Nut Cheerios, to create a more nutritionally balanced meal. To make myself feel better about eating Honey Nut Cheerios, which have, in the recent years, been downgraded from “healthy cereal” to “pseudo healthy cereal.” SUGAR IS BAD!

Sugar will rot your teeth and soil your blood. Too bad I’m addicted to it because it’s in everything I eat. Too bad I don’t care because my grandfather is 94 and eats chocolates all day. I want to ask him about what the supermarkets were like 72 years ago but I can’t because he has horrible dementia and lives in a veteran nursing home thousands of miles away from the supermarket I currently occupy. Even if I could talk with him, I don’t think there would be much to discuss. I don’t think the supermarket has changed very much. It’s a good ruler in that way. Consistent, reliable.

“Things are smaller, things are more expensive, things taste worse.” Blah blah blah. Okay duh. Get used to it. Next.

Up and down the aisles. You are what you eat. I am Pillsbury cinnamon rolls. I ate them on Sundays before going to church. My mom would call it cinnamon roll Sunday. I would wake up to warm morning sunshine and the smell of them baking in the oven. The middle roll is the best roll in the pan. My mom is the best mom in the world. I don’t go to church anymore but I still go to the supermarket. I don’t buy a tube of cinnamon rolls because SUGAR IS BAD! I guess I do care. The farm was in Vermont. We would sweeten our coffee with maple syrup.

I am definitely a tub of Jif peanut butter. There is no other peanut butter as delicious as Jif peanut butter. Not everything is supposed to taste natural. Imagine if every bite of food I put into my mouth, I worried about how natural it was, about additives and dyes and dextrose or whatever. I would be paralyzed. I would be able to feel the blood coursing through the thick blue veins that run up and down the insides of my arms. Hot tears would fill my eyes, my stomach would tighten, scary thoughts would flash through my head, patchy and blindingly white. You’re dying. You’re dying. Your expiration date is here. I have never once felt this way when eating Jif peanut butter. Bitches with peanut allergies can’t relate. Haha. One time a boy got mad at me for making a joke about his peanut allergy.

Up and down, up and down. Now I’m getting anxious. Not from the food, I’m not thinking about the food. It’s the megan trainor retail music and the rattling of the carts and the flat light. Everyone is a little too close to me and why did she decide to block the whole aisle with her cart as she tries to pick out the perfect flavor of Campbell’s canned soup. There is no perfect flavor of Campbell’s canned soup. Take a deep breath. Think about Andy Warhol or something. Think “this aisle looks like an Andy Warhol.” This lady has the stupidest looking thick, square-tip, turquoise fingernails and her fake ass blonde hair makes her look like she hasn’t drank a glass of water in her entire life! Excuse me. I am polite. She is oh, sorry! She doesn’t have to be sorry, I was already mean to her inside of my head.

I turn the corner and stand at the precipice of the chip aisle. Corn and potato in one thousand iterations, why? Because we can! This is America! This is freedom! Do you want to get Fritos or Fritos Scoops or Fritos Honey Barbecue Twists or Fritos Chili Cheese or Cheetos or Cheetos Puffs or Flamin’ Hot Cheetos or Cheddar Jalapeño Cheetos or Cheddar Jalapeño Cheetos Puffs or Simply Cheetos White Cheddar or Nacho Cheese Doritos or Cool Ranch Doritos or Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos or Flamin Hot Doritos or Flamin Hot Doritos with Lime or or or or or or or or or or What do you want? You can have anything that you want! Just name it, name what you want, you can choose, it can be yours, for the low price of whatever, it can be yours. What do you want? Just name it. Just name it.

I do. I get the Kettle Brand Backyard Barbecue Chips because I am a Classic All-American Girl. Please look at my soft brunette hair and my straight white teeth and know that I am a Classic All-American Girl. I am going to eat these chips for dinner and lick my fingers when I’m done.

My hands are cold as I push my cart back to the perimeter of the store, past the Land-o-Lakes butter, the Yoplait yogurt, and three hundred other dairy products. I will buy generic sour cream. I love sour cream. I love to dunk pierogis in sour cream when I’m drunk. I will buy more frozen pierogis for the next time I am drunk. They sit in a freezer with glass doors on an end cap. Alongside several varieties of mass manufactured taquitos. These food objects were machine pressed and filled with meat goo in a windowless factory. They don’t taste as bad as they are.

Quick! Can you guess what time it is? Good luck.

It is the middle of winter but it could be the middle of summer or the middle of forever. I am in The American Supermarket. I do not know what time it is. It is sometime between 6am and 11pm. It does not matter what time it is because I am never going to die! I am in The American Supermarket! I am the king of this grand chamber! My reign will last infinity days under this preserved sun where I will devour perfect replicas of apples and of bananas, of butter and of yogurt forever and ever!!!

I am now in the far right corner of the store. I am looking at the open, refrigerated shelves that hold the milk and the eggs. It is at the milk and eggs you must be extra, extra careful to not think too much or too hard. You must not think about green grass or blue skies. You must not think about a lush springtime morning, where dew collects in tiny, glittering drops on the bright young leaves of the trees. Tiny chicks chirping in nests of hay, their fragile heads looking for crawling insects to eat. Calves grazing beside their gentle mothers in the cool early air. You must not think about how it would feel to walk softly beside these animals and lay a hand on the warm solid bone between their eyes, petting their giant necks and cheeks and telling them good morning by name. You especially must not think about the sound of milk hitting the sides of a clean metal bowl, the thick frothy cream, the delicate feathers stuck to the sides of still warm eggs, pale brown, flecked, sometimes the softest green or blue, with rich golden yolks. Don’t think about that. This is not that. This is just food. Just food.

I’m shivering. My lips are turning blue. I don’t want to live forever. I want to die. To expire. And rot. Before this, I want to get bruised and turn wrinkly and stale. This is to say I want to live a real life. This is to say I want to go back to that farm where every day was new. There was a long, sunny day and it was July 28th and the zucchini was ready to harvest. There was a gloomy, humid day and it was August 9th and I watched a sow give birth to eleven piglets. There was a bright, cool day and it was September 17th and the tinge of yellow on the very tops of the trees told me it was the end of summer. I don’t know what day it is anymore. I put a dozen eggs into my cart.

I need tin foil. Let me grab some tin foil. I acquire one roll of aluminum foil.

Okay. I think I’ve got everything. I move towards the front center of the store. It’s time to check out. I did good. I moved swiftly and efficiently. I didn’t block the whole aisle with my cart. I said excuse me. The boy and his girlfriend are at checkout number 7. Lucky them. I unload my food and my foil onto the black conveyor belt of checkout number 19. The clerk has very long braids and a name tag that says RENEE. She scans my items as I read that JOHNNY BEATS LYING AMBER, KIM DOWN 25LBS, HARRY AND MEGAN ARE DONE. My total is 71 dollars 93 cents. My 71 dollars and 93 cents will support the protraction of this great American institution. I insert the chip to pay with my debit card. I make 20 dollars an hour nannying a little boy. These groceries have cost 3 hours and 36 minutes of my labor. I purchased:

—5 apples
—4 pears
—a bunch of bananas
—2 lemons
—dill
—organic kale
—a yellow onion
—a loaf of sourdough bread
—a wedge of parmesan cheese
—a block of extra sharp white cheddar cheese
—a sushi roll (to eat in my car before driving home)
—2 tins of oil packed tuna
—2 cans of butter beans
—BBQ chips
—a case of peach flavored sparkling water
—sour cream
—frozen pierogis
—oat milk
—one dozen organic, pasture-raised eggs
—tin foil