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May. 12th, 2009 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonKrogers after Midnight. Need cheap cigarettes, orange juice and eggs for a 1am breakfast special. The self check out lanes are down though and there's only one register open. Looking at a line snaked out ten customers deep and not one of them ten items or less. There's an arguement up front between the sole cashier and a woman juggling a small child, a check book and her cell-phone. Magick 8-ball sez: In it for the long haul. Flip through gossip rags and miss Weekly World News headlines from the collective subconscious of America - Bat Boys in West Virginia, Sasquatch Diet, Amazing predictions of Comet Doom. Begin humming All lost in the supermarket obnoxiously loud and smirking at my own little in-joke.
"I can no longer no shop hap-pily..." a voice chimes in behind me.
Turn around and fall in love.
She stands behind her cart. Tall as me if not taller. Athletic build. Loose dark brown vest, wide olive green skirt and sky blue thigh high leggings. Glasses with strands of sun bleached tan and blonde bob dangle in front of magnified eyes. She smiles sheepishly at me. The song breaks off into a squeek of an apology that sounds like its playing sped up. She nods at something behind me. The lane has moved up one. I fill in the space and blush under the weight of her presence.
I'm on the clock now. Time is running out. I want to say something but can't think of what. I keep stealing glances over at her. She's leaning over her cart, reading a paperback copy of Lolita. There's a tattoo done in the style of a Grecian Vase depicting a weeping man that rises out of her wrist and whose laureled brow ends on the inside of her elbow. She catches me staring and raises a brow in order that I may clarify why I'm so rudely oogling her.
"I like your, um... your inks"
"Thanks" she hiss whispers and disappears behind the book.
Master of Small Talk, that's me!
After a half dozen close calls at an actual conversation we finally hit the lane's conveyer belt. I plop down my OJ and eggs. Behind me the Woman with the Blue Stockings begins carefully arranging her groceries into a pattern that she constantly readjusts. It's as if she's playing Tetris or something. She frets over the placement of Kashi cereal and several Ethnic Gourmet microwave dinners. Replacing them with each other and then putting everything back in the cart and starts over again beginning with the yogurt.
Ritalin high? OCD? The Crazy? Beats me but there's something beautiful about watching her solve this intractable puzzle that has arisen from the most unexpectantly mundane of circumstances. She is a frantic calm; her mind a whirlwind of senses whose currents are directed by the strength that lays at its center.
Tell her... tell her how your thoughts, your life, your love is just such a puzzle. One that could feed the demons that consume her with obsession. I could be a single strand of curly hair between their fingers, so that these beasts would spend the rest of their lives trying to straighten it out.
"Ring them shits up again!" the Big guy in front of me demands of the cashier, a woman in her early 50's who clearly had at one point in the not so distant past worked a much better job than this. She swipes a keg sized jar of mayonaise over the scanner and repeats the price.
"No, no-no-no... I'm sorry but that's wrong... go back and check!" Big Guy snarls. He's only half way through his barge of cheap meat and frozen pizzas.
"Okay..." the cashier sighs and leaves the register.
The Woman in the Blue Stockings is biting her lip and removing all the groceries from the conveyor belt again back into her cart. She just can't the pattern right.
Enough...
I take her by the wrist, wrapping my fingers lightly around Kid Orpheus' neck. With a Zen Courage, a confidence that has arisen in me with no precedent of thought or desire before it, tell her simply - "C'mon. Let's get outta here!"
"What?" she speaks at me with a baffled alarm, as if I was only a moment ago I was nothing more than a phantasm lingering along the periphery of her attention who had the temerity to suddenly make itself real.
"Leave it. We'll go somewhere. I'll buy you dinner. We can talk. We can be real people. Not for long. Just an hour, maybe. This..." I wave at her clear bagged fruit and hyper-fiber saturated bread, "...this ain't going anywhere and right now neither are we."
I don't know where the words are coming from but they speak with my voice and she...
... smiles. Not nervous this time. Awake. Aware. At me.
"Okay"
"Really?"
"Yeah... 'really'"
We abandon cart, basket and groceries right there. Step out of the line in which we waited for the better part of fifteen minutes in silence and ignore the people shouting at us as we walk out the exit, directly into the parking lot, straight to her car and ... yeah, really.
"I can no longer no shop hap-pily..." a voice chimes in behind me.
Turn around and fall in love.
She stands behind her cart. Tall as me if not taller. Athletic build. Loose dark brown vest, wide olive green skirt and sky blue thigh high leggings. Glasses with strands of sun bleached tan and blonde bob dangle in front of magnified eyes. She smiles sheepishly at me. The song breaks off into a squeek of an apology that sounds like its playing sped up. She nods at something behind me. The lane has moved up one. I fill in the space and blush under the weight of her presence.
I'm on the clock now. Time is running out. I want to say something but can't think of what. I keep stealing glances over at her. She's leaning over her cart, reading a paperback copy of Lolita. There's a tattoo done in the style of a Grecian Vase depicting a weeping man that rises out of her wrist and whose laureled brow ends on the inside of her elbow. She catches me staring and raises a brow in order that I may clarify why I'm so rudely oogling her.
"I like your, um... your inks"
"Thanks" she hiss whispers and disappears behind the book.
Master of Small Talk, that's me!
After a half dozen close calls at an actual conversation we finally hit the lane's conveyer belt. I plop down my OJ and eggs. Behind me the Woman with the Blue Stockings begins carefully arranging her groceries into a pattern that she constantly readjusts. It's as if she's playing Tetris or something. She frets over the placement of Kashi cereal and several Ethnic Gourmet microwave dinners. Replacing them with each other and then putting everything back in the cart and starts over again beginning with the yogurt.
Ritalin high? OCD? The Crazy? Beats me but there's something beautiful about watching her solve this intractable puzzle that has arisen from the most unexpectantly mundane of circumstances. She is a frantic calm; her mind a whirlwind of senses whose currents are directed by the strength that lays at its center.
Tell her... tell her how your thoughts, your life, your love is just such a puzzle. One that could feed the demons that consume her with obsession. I could be a single strand of curly hair between their fingers, so that these beasts would spend the rest of their lives trying to straighten it out.
"Ring them shits up again!" the Big guy in front of me demands of the cashier, a woman in her early 50's who clearly had at one point in the not so distant past worked a much better job than this. She swipes a keg sized jar of mayonaise over the scanner and repeats the price.
"No, no-no-no... I'm sorry but that's wrong... go back and check!" Big Guy snarls. He's only half way through his barge of cheap meat and frozen pizzas.
"Okay..." the cashier sighs and leaves the register.
The Woman in the Blue Stockings is biting her lip and removing all the groceries from the conveyor belt again back into her cart. She just can't the pattern right.
Enough...
I take her by the wrist, wrapping my fingers lightly around Kid Orpheus' neck. With a Zen Courage, a confidence that has arisen in me with no precedent of thought or desire before it, tell her simply - "C'mon. Let's get outta here!"
"What?" she speaks at me with a baffled alarm, as if I was only a moment ago I was nothing more than a phantasm lingering along the periphery of her attention who had the temerity to suddenly make itself real.
"Leave it. We'll go somewhere. I'll buy you dinner. We can talk. We can be real people. Not for long. Just an hour, maybe. This..." I wave at her clear bagged fruit and hyper-fiber saturated bread, "...this ain't going anywhere and right now neither are we."
I don't know where the words are coming from but they speak with my voice and she...
... smiles. Not nervous this time. Awake. Aware. At me.
"Okay"
"Really?"
"Yeah... 'really'"
We abandon cart, basket and groceries right there. Step out of the line in which we waited for the better part of fifteen minutes in silence and ignore the people shouting at us as we walk out the exit, directly into the parking lot, straight to her car and ... yeah, really.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2009-05-13 05:27 am (UTC)i can't be sure whether or nor it actually happened
because you tell it so well...
no subject
on 2009-05-13 03:47 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-13 06:05 am (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-13 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-13 06:07 am (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-13 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-13 05:09 pm (UTC)But - I think I was thinking it didn't matter if it happened in the RealWorld, and was trying to figure out if you grabbed her arm with the weeping man urn on it.
no subject
on 2009-05-13 07:57 am (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-13 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-13 03:33 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-13 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-13 09:25 pm (UTC)xxx
no subject
on 2009-05-14 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-13 11:17 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-14 04:48 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-16 10:29 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-17 02:16 am (UTC)