The air tasted crisp – cool – but it was still midsummer. The student laced his shoes methodically. One – two – knot. One – two – knot and started his journey, walking slowly in half broken circles down the stairs to the sidewalk. Lately this trip was his only destination outside his apartment. His mother had often told him an evening walk was good for one’s health. He loved his mother and believed everything she told him.
Many would've been surprised to know that his favorite foods were rather simple considering his flair for expensive things - he liked spaghetti with meat, cooked meat with vegetables – things he could cook for himself and quite often did. When he was young, his mother had told him that cooking was “for simple people.” He had never been allowed to consider a career as a chef, and thought scornfully of food preparers as his mother had taught him to do. Despite his coached disdain for culinary mastery, the very taste of fresh orange juice was an exquisite elixir as any to him. The mere knowledge of his destination set his mouth twitching perhaps from anticipation.
His goal was up ahead; he envisioned the crisp smells that would soon fill his nostrils. He had always loved to come here, ever since he was a small child. It was not simply a love for food, but the clean swept isles, brightly lit displays, and array of smells. He was almost there now. He rounded the corner.
There was the supermarket. A smile lit his face – all other thoughts were driven from his mind. His rapture was so extreme that he only noticed the homeless man sitting on the sidewalk outside the store when he tripped over him. The man’s grotesque grimy lips lay parted slightly as if still tasting the narcotic no longer there. His green jacket could have once been an army issue, but tattered as it was, no one could know which it had belonged to. It reeked now of a sickly sweet odor of garbage not death. As the student drew closer to the entrance the bum turned his half-tilted head upwards, as if seeking absolution. But it was not god he sought.
“I need some food.”
He gestured vaguely in the darkness with his empty, stained coffee cup. The young man turned his head, pretending not to notice the bum. After all, his mother had always told him to look away from people like that. So he did just what she’d said and pointed his eyes away from this interruption – towards the inside of the store. His face contorted from the concentration necessary to ignore this pothole in his rainbow, or it could have been from his stricken fear and willing his feet to escape. His mother had taught him to avoid such people.
The momentary displeasure of the brief encounter was immediately forgotten. A smell of freshness enveloped him. He entered the store like a long lost lover, toting a green basket under his left arm. The produce made him fantasize himself an adventurer lost in a deep jungle somewhere in the South Americas. Some of the vines were too close to his face, and he brushed them away impudently. In this section of the jungle, the natives had left him a tribute, great adventurer that he was. They had piled high their native fruits so that he could peruse them at his will. He nearly laughed but paused midway, and remembered. He was in a grocery store.
A small child across the aisle pondered his brown tweed jacket, and then moved on to looking at his shoes. The child was eating one hand with a certain glee that only small children can have for such things. Seeing this little creature so intent on his feet, he returned the attention by regarding the child. He gave the child a conspiratory wink intimating their shared origin. He thought his mother must have taken him around much like the child before him. The mother was picking through apples, searching for the perfect bag. She felt a stranger’s gaze, and half-turned to take hold of her child’s hand. He felt the sudden impulse to make clear his inane nature - to make contact with them. He smiled awkwardly,
“What a beautiful child.” He felt sure he seemed ridiculous.
“Thank you,” the mother replied demurely.
She avoided his eyes. The pair moved off slowly down the aisle pausing here and there to examine various produce. Even after they had moved out of sight, he remembered the child’s innocent blue eyes open wide at his shiny shoes. He had learned to love children.
Product upon product, shelf stacked on shelf, aisle after aisle, the store enveloped him, slowly. He imagined the process like a boa swallowing him whole.
He found himself again amidst the baked goods. The cakes, the cookies, the pastries, the mounds of sweet goods made him feel lost in a maze. The little icing dots on the multitude of desserts moved across his vision as if a hypnotic suggestion. He paused, entranced at the sight of a nearby birthday cake. It read Happy Birthday Johnny. The writing popped out in light blue icing across a field of white frosting smooth as a fresh snowfall. The girl behind the baker’s counter was pretty. Many would even have called her beautiful. He liked the way her light brown eyebrows pushed together forming half a question mark.
“Hi! Can I get you anything?” She pursed her terribly perfect pink lips.
“Ummm… uhhh…” He stuttered. With a noncommittal blush he told the floor, “I’m okay.”
“Okay, well just you let me know if you change your mind.”
She smiled as she turned away, her bobbing blond pigtails swished from the back of her baker’s cap. He too moved back from the counter as if recoiling from some image her hair had invoked. The smell of the stale bread filled him and he felt desperate to move away from her. He had learned to feel awkward.
The store was beginning to wind down. The hum from the hubbub now reduced to a few final notes from the last customers moving purposefully to their final purchases. With the blank white aisles running between aisles quickly emptied, and he thought to find what he came for. He walked the length of the store, peering at the signs, almost believing they were in a foreign language. Amidst his sudden desire to come to here, he had forgotten his glasses at home. His vision hadn’t been an issue until now, as he attempted to finish his quest. Up ahead, he saw his goal, a meat pie. He picked up the package gingerly and inspected its nutritional content. His mother had always told him to do so. After passing his doctoresque examination, he decided he approved and finished his mission at the checkout.
The parking lot was black like only empty space at night can be; the field of cars vanished in a magic trick, left an open and desolate expanse. Though only just ten o’clock, the still air had the quiet of nearing midnight. Stepping off the curb, he crossed this wasteland, again picturing himself an adventurer. With each step he felt from his sneakers should have made ripples ricochet across the pool of blackness. The tarmac looked infinitely deeper than reality.
Reaching the far end of the lot, a sharp pain suddenly pierced his knee. He tried to look down but fell; in his one glance, his leg seemed disjointed – funnily attached. Booming noises resounded in his ears. He didn’t realize they were coming from his own body. The pain moved up his leg and flowed into his lower back, and then the back of his neck. Two hands roughly pawed at him, probing his contents. In his eyes, the parking lot dimmed like a setting sun falling directly into midnight. Soon the groping stopped.
Crumpled, he gasped as a diver does surfacing for air – but only the pool was of his own belonging and the air choked with garbage. Unable to find the surface, he slipped backwards into a dreamlike calm. His dazed expression could almost have been mistaken for ecstasy. Images entered his mind like the last flickering light on a reel of film. The mother’s fingers delicately intertwined with her child. His mother. The surreptitious smile of the pretty girl baking. Previous thoughts. Lessons passed. And in that final moment, he learned something unexpected.