She And Mr. Uniform

Russ Bickerstaff is a professional theatre and comic book critic and aspiring author living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with his wife and two daughters. His short fictions have appeared in over 30 different publications including Hypertext Magazine, Pulp Metal Magazine, Sein und Werden, and Theme of Absence.

I probably didn’t see her coming. I was only waiting for a bus. There she was trying to light a cigarette. The lighter didn’t seem to be working out for her. She asked me if I had a light. I didn’t. I hadn’t smoked in years. And so I didn’t carry a lighter with me. I tried to explain as much to her as casually as possible, but for some reason I was way too nervous around her to say much of anything in anything other than a very, very awkward tone of voice that was exceedingly grating to my own ears. Luckily, she didn’t seem at all annoyed by my awkwardness. It should be pointed out that at the time I was wearing the uniform, which generally has a tendency to make people very, very nervous, so it wasn’t like I was in any position to really make anything very much easier for her just by virtue of standing there in uniform. But the fact that she had made a point of asking me for a light to begin with showed that she had more than a bit of a relaxed demeanor around those of us in uniform to begin with, so she was kind of a rarity. It was all perfectly okay at that moment and I guess I should probably have been in a position to think about something clever to say as we were both in the shelter there waiting for the bus to come, I  really couldn’t imagine what I was about to say. 

I guess it was kind of a strange that she didn’t say something about the uniform. She didn’t even acknowledge it or anything like that and I guess I probably should have had that tip me off that something was strange, but I guess I was off duty and probably not thinking too much about it. You wear the uniform like I do on long hours and you end up forgetting it’s even there. You just sort of learn to sort of kind of think that people address you in a certain way because of who you are. It’s not like you’re thinking in terms of what you’re wearing, but it ends up getting in the way and you end up thinking weird thoughts about the whole thing if you’re not careful. I guess that’s what I’m saying. But I guess she seemed kind of nice. And it’s weird saying this now after all that’s happened and everything, but it’s kind of weird thinking about the fact that I thought she was nice when it wasn’t like there was anything much to go on with respect to that impression. I mean . . . all she did was ask for a light and all I did was tell her I didn’t have one and then tell her why I didn’t have one and she didn’t really say much more than that, but it’s like I was saying about the uniform–most people act all stiff and formal around it. She was just relaxed. And she was just treating me like any other person. That was it. 

So we were both standing there at the bus stop in silence for a little while. And usually you end up there standing around and you’re talkin’ to people and more and more people show up by the time the bus comes, but this was one of those weird times in the schedule where for whatever reason, no one was gonna show up. And so I guess I was kind of in a strange state of mind with regards to it at that stage and I guess I probably should have thought things through when she invited me to come hang out with her where she was going. It kind of came out of nowhere. That invitation. It was like–y’know–one moment she asks me for a light. And then I tell her I don’t have one and I tell her why and then there’s silence and the next moment she’s inviting me where she’s going. Who does that?

Anyway . . . so I guess it was probably against my better judgment to go ahead and say yes to what she wanted, but I went ahead and decided that I’d follow her where she was going anyway. Kind of weird how the bus came right when I said yes. I mean . . . I didn’t even see it coming or anything like that and there it was just suddenly and everything. Wham. Just like that it’s there suddenly and suddenly everything’s happening. Weird, right? But totally understandable. 

Always kind of awkward sitting on a bus with a stranger. I guess she wasn’t exactly a stranger at that point. I’d gotten her name and we’d said hello and everything, but it was kind of weird to think about it like that because it’s not like there was really anything that either of us could have done about the fact that the bus was actually kind of crowded. So there’s one seat between the two of us and it’d be kind of weird for one of us to sit and the other to stand, but being the nice person I am I go ahead and let her sit down. And it’s just a little too weird trying to talk to her while she’s sitting and I’m standing and everything, but I don’t know . . . I guess I really just sort of needed to get things moving for me and so I just sort of crouched and let her not talk to me. Better that than crouching to make awkward conversation, but things could always be worse in one way or another, right? I mean . . . it’s not like there’s anything that I was going to be able to do about anything anyway so I guess that I’m in kind of a weird frame of mind about the whole thing.

Some Things

Andrew Boulton is a lecturer in creative advertising. His flash fiction stories have been accepted and published in journals including Retreat West, Lunate Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bath Flash Fiction anthology and Storgy. He live in Nottingham with his wife, daughter and a chubby cat.

It stayed there for a week, under the bananas, and Eva thought I’ll be fucked if I’m opening it.

A week of being alone in the apartment hadn’t been so bad. Actually, it had been unexpectedly wonderful. 

She ate at the counter, butterless corned beef sandwiches and mojito in a can while she watched her favourite film trailers. She liked that, liked it far more than the formal cooking and dining and rehearsed conversation routine that made her feel like she was in an old British play about two university professors who got married for intellectual reasons and now realised that wasn’t enough.

She watched series the way she liked to, sometimes in half episode chunks, sometimes in marathon bursts that left her feeling more part of the fiction than she was her own life.

She even tried to piss with the toilet door open, but this made her uneasy so she compromised by shutting the door but never locking it.

Tom texted her every night, but she forgot what he said almost as soon as she read them. Something about being more reasonable, something about understanding the way he feels about the world rather than just building a life the way she needs it to be. Something about turning into her father, if she wasn’t careful.

She’d text back from the toilet, long and deliberately sympathetic messages that took severe editing before she found the right balance between sustaining the conversation and avoiding one in person.

At night she went to sleep on her side but always woke up on his. The light on his side of the room fell differently to hers and it irritated her that he’d kept this to himself. Be more reasonable, she wrote on a bus ticket and pinned it to the pineapple that had been in the fruit bowl for a month.

Tom texted to say he needed some things and, without thinking, she replied to ask him what things. This was a mistake and her phone rattled on the arm of the chair throughout the evening as a long, hurtful exchange of messages dragged them both past midnight, amongst other things.

Have you even read it, wrote Tom after the longest silence of the night. And, for longer than was ok, Eva had no idea what he meant. 

the rubber on the highway looks like roadkill

Meredith Faulkner is a writer and editor living in North Carolina with her husband and cat. She likes to write about marriage and mental health, and her work can also be found in tenderness lit, MICRO // MACRO, Nightingale and Sparrow, and Kissing Dynamite. 

“Hello,” he says.

“Interstate,” she says.

The road from Houston to New Orleans is bare and swampy stretch of I-10. There is little to do but make up rules to games with no prizes.

He finds three in a row. “Jeep. Kia. Louisiana.” 

Three bugs splat loudly onto the windshield in quick succession. 

“Ew,” she says. “Oh! Morris Bart!”

“Who the hell is Morris Bart? You sound like you know him.”

“I dunno. A billboard lawyer. He follows you from here to Florida. Get used to him.” 

“Never been this far east.” 

“Used to be I had never been west of the Mississippi.” 

“Maybe that’s how Art will grow up. Speaking of, need to pee?” 

“I can wait for our next gas stop. Thanks for checking.” 

She looks restlessly from left to right, maybe searching for the letter N. 

“You keep doing that. Looking over your shoulder. Is someone following us?” 

“I keep forgetting it’s just us two. I miss him.” 

“Yeah. He was good.” 

“And I feel like we’ve passed the same goddamn corpse every twenty miles or so. He’s everywhere. Like Morris fucking Bart.” 

“It’s just raccoons. Or garbage bags. Or tires.” 

“It’s him. He—”

“Would not have survived the move. A three-week road trip with him pissing everywhere and crying when he moved would have been—”

“Unbearable.” 

“Yeah. That. It was time.” 

There are no Ns in sight. Billboards are sparse, save for Morris Bart’s watchful gaze.

“It’s like he’s waiting for us to get in a car wreck,” she says. 

“Could be worse. Felt like Houston was full of funeral home advertisements.”

They sit in silence, listening to the occasional splat of bugs exploding into viscous goo. 

“I’ll get you a virgin daiquiri tonight,” he offers. “We can do one of those haunted pub crawls, find a bar with some live music, walk on the river—”

“I miss Seattle,” she says. “I used to miss Atlanta, and then Jackson, and in Seattle I missed Houston. Someday I’ll probably miss Orlando. So will Art.”

“You need to cry?” he asks.

“I’ll be OK.” She pauses. “Hey, New Orleans! Two in one.”

They drive as they have for days, away from the eventual sunset. 

Badlands

JW Goll is a writer and artist currently working as a Patient Advocate at a large hospital in Durham, North Carolina. JW Goll’s stories are born of experiences as a photographer in Chicago, the Dakotas, and Central Europe.

The moment begins when I am twenty-seven. I hike into the Badlands of South Dakota at Cuny Table and discover potshards scored with zigzags and swirls. It’s illegal to collect artifacts on Federal land, so I put them at the bottom of my pack and walk away thinking, finders keepers, the way it’s always been. Then I leave my camera in someone’s car as I hitchhike back to Chicago and I think about the potshards a bit differently. When I return I smoke and drink and collect objects from the alleys and try to sell them as art. If I bind two objects together with baling wire then it’s high art and I charge double. Then it snows and snows and I can’t give my are away. I help a woman move because I think she will sleep with me, but pizza and an old boyfriend’s sweater is what I get, which is a better deal anyway. Another girl named Lucy lets me sleep on her couch until it gets warm. She’s from Birmingham, Alabama and makes fried eggs with grits most mornings. There is a gas explosion across the street and I’m deaf for a week. After that Lucy forgets to pay rent and we go our separate ways. I read the papers every day and the AIDS news is not good, but the boys go into Lincoln Park at night just the same, mostly high when they go in and weary when they come out. On Fridays nights I go to art openings and eat my fill of cheese, grapes, and crackers. I look at the paintings, the sculptures and the installations and I think I could do better than anything I see. So I do, and with the help of my friend David we make a killing selling art knockoffs from a cardboard table in front of the Art Institute until the cops scoot us off. Somehow our creations don’t sell well anywhere else. After a few more drinks and cigarettes I return to South Dakota and dump the potshards on the shore of the White River in the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands. I walk out of the Badlands at thirty-two and think life is about to get better, but I try not to get too cocky about it.

The Great Chain of Unbeing

Howie Good is the author most recently of  Spooky Action at a Distance from Analog Submission Press. He co-edits the journals Unbroken and UnLost and teaches at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

I fell asleep to the rat-tat-tat of rain and dreamed I could breathe underwater. The grieving came later, when we learned there could be such a thing as too much sunshine. Animal rescuers cut open a whale’s belly on the beach and found coins and plastic water bottles inside. Maybe it was a cry for help, but maybe not. People were saying it was only a matter of time before those little white birds returned to pick clean the teeth of crocodiles. Meanwhile, the rain would be represented by a succession of broken lines, and death by x’s for eyes.

Everyone Said It Would Be Like A Country Song

L Mari Harris works as a copywriter in the tech industry. Her work has appeared in Atticus Review, Bending Genres, cahoodaloodaling, Gravel, Lost Balloon, Milk Candy Review, among others. Follow her on Twitter @LMariHarris and read more of her work at www.lmariharris.wordpress.com.       

It was Mama, telling me to find an ugly man. Or sober. Sober’s probably better. It was the priest at their wedding, looking into Mama’s eyes as he reproached, The man is king of his castle. All the guests nodded in agreement. It was Daddy, movie-star handsome, life of the party. Burned so bright Mama shielded her eyes in every old photo. In one, her smile is giddy shock, like she’s just walked through the front door to have a light switch thrown and Surprise! shouted at her from everyone hiding behind the couch. It was another morning, Daddy like softened butter after the yelling behind the bedroom door had petered out. Bashful smile, calling me sweet pea. I know he knows I know. After school, I find a pony, wearing a pink bow, tied to the fence. I name it Jolene. Daddy says That’s my favorite song. Mama says I bet it is and doesn’t speak for the rest of the night. It was more gas station carnations. More vows, things are going to change. Mama side eyeing him. She’s the real king of this castle. It was four women coming round over the years, all claiming to love Daddy, each buckled from a bar stool, each pointing a Cherries in the Snow fingernail in Mama’s face, three bottle blondes and one loud redhead. If they loved him so much, why didn’t any of them take him? Because they knew what the day to day would be like. It was Grandma, sitting in our kitchen, eating another piece of pecan coffee cake still warm from the oven, telling Mama Stop stirring him up! She had no room to talk. It was me, helping Mama dig a hole down by the creek, cash box wrapped in garbage bags, all the money she’s been able to squirrel away. Between the booze and the poker and the, well, someone has to keep a roof over our heads. It was the judge, sentencing Daddy to thirty days. Son, this is your chance to turn it around. Mama takes me to DQ every night he’s away. We eat Dilly Bars and watch the sun set over the water tower. I keep thinking she’s about to say something. What? I ask again and again. It was Mama, telling me about the time she was thinking of leaving him, that she’d made her bed but my smile was drooping more by the day. But then a knock on the door, a friend of theirs standing under the porch light, moths circling and banging into him, head hanging like the sun had announced it was all sunned out, telling Mama my movie-star handsome daddy was gone, a fight over a woman, a woman my mama thought she knew well. It was Mama, selling Daddy’s weapons after he died to pay the rent. She kept the Remington, bought a box of double- aught, hid the shotgun behind her closet door. He’s not sweet talking anyone anymore and some of them are just now figuring out what they’re owed. It was me, remembering Daddy all middle- age thickness but still shining like an August sun, index and middle finger holding an unfiltered cigarette, thumb and palm wrapped around a PBR, Mama squinting, me just off to the side under the shade tree. I wish I could go back, tell Daddy to slow down, that he’s burning us up.

Water

Christopher James lives, works and writes in Jakarta, Indonesia. He has been published online in Booth, SmokeLong, Tin House, and Wigleaf, among others.

The sun rose before it was due, or his watch was wrong, and Rakma went to his son and shook him awake. His son, ten years old, silent for the last three, asleep in the grass, resisted shaking, and it was some fifteen minutes before he was sitting up, taking the water Rakma offered him. “Good?” asked Rakma, and his son said nothing.

“Come,” said Rakma. “Help me.”

Together, they turned the boat upright and cleaned it of dirt. “You missed the early dawn,” said Rakma, and, later, “Don’t worry, it looked the same as any other sunrise,” and, later still, “Normally it comes up after 5, but today it came up just before,” and, by then, they were ready. “You already know when the sun usually rises, uh? I don’t know how, sleeping the way you do.”

Rakma fetched the oars and his son found a snack bar for breakfast. “Hurry up,” said Rakma, “We have to go.”

The lake took an hour to cross. Sometimes Rakma grunted with the effort of rowing but the only other noise was the lapping of the waves. The boy trailed a hand over the side, letting the green water wet his fingers. Boat rides, the sea, both encourage thought. Rakma found the entrance to the inlet first time, which felt lucky. He put an unnecessary finger to his lips, warning his son to stay silent. A little joke, as amusing as it was disappointing. They pushed forward through the narrow channel. Rakma pointed at hanging roots the boy should take to help them through. After ten minutes of this, they came into a clearing.

This was a clearing like a scene from The Land that Time Forgot. Emerging as it did from the narrow canal, it would be easy to imagine a birth. Without being asked, Rakma’s son slipped out of his clothes and into the water. He swam in splashless strokes to the side, where he sat on a rock. Rakma stayed in the boat.

Soon, the Godzilla would swallow his son, and then Rakma could leave. The next day, they’d do it all over again.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the clearing, Super Godzilla woke. His son was already up, bouncing off the walls of their cave. Come on dad, come on dad, come on dad, come on dad, said Godzilla. We’re going to be late, we’ve got to go!

Plenty of time, thought Super Godzilla, but he didn’t check the position of the sun in the sky to confirm in case he was wrong. Get me a coffee, he said. Godzilla already had it, and he held it out to him now. Hurry, dad, hurry dad!

Bounce, run, jump, sprint to the edge of their circle and back, repeat. Sooner than he’d have liked, Super Godzilla agreed to leave. He forgot to take a paper with him to read on the journey, and debated going back to fetch one, but decided he wasn’t quite awake enough to deal with the tornado this would turn his son into. Choose your battles, he reminded himself.

Super Godzilla followed the path and Godzilla went everywhere but. This was the only way the two of them could move at the same pace, and as long as Super Godzilla kept an ear open for the sounds of his son trampling down trees and bushes he knew they were both safe.

It took forever to reach the water and the boy was already there, sitting in his place on the rocks. They hadn’t once beaten him to it, and if Super Godzilla had his way they never would. 

Come here, he said to his son, and give me a hug. He hugged him for as long as he could, until Godzilla finally squirreled his way out of the embrace. Then Godzilla ran off to swallow the boy and Super Godzilla wondered how time had passed so fast. The next day they’d do it once more.

Rakma watched the larger beast from the water. Super Godzilla watched the man sitting in his boat. They nodded to each other, and then left. Strange man, thought Super Godzilla. The water was deep, and at the bottom of the lake there was a hole that went somewhere nobody knew because nothing had been there before.

My Father’s Underwear

J. Edward Kruft received his MFA in fiction writing from Brooklyn College, and has been a Best Small Fictions nominee. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in several journals, including Back Patio Press, Cabinet of Heed and Jellyfish Review. He is deathly afraid of mice. He lives in Queens, NY and Sullivan County, NY with his husband, Mike, and their adopted Siberian Husky, Sasha. His fictions can be found on his Web site: www.jedwardkruft.com and he can be followed @jedwardkruft.

My father died putting on his underwear. He managed the first leg, but on the next go around, he hooked his big toe on the elastic and did a header into the dresser. 

My sister found him in full rigor and called me, then 911. The paramedics and I arrived at the same time. They were the ones who nailed it down.

“Course, you’d have to wait for the coroner’s report….”

“Yep.”

“…but if you ask me, it was a header.”

“Yep. Definitely a header.”

“Definitely.”

Throughout his 57 years, my father thought nothing of saying things like: “I’m sweating like a negro on election day.” Only his word of choice wasn’t “negro.” For a long time, I too didn’t think twice about it. That’s what kids do: they parrot. Today, I cringe at the memory of running into a girl I crushed on, who was with her Asian friend, who said, “Hey, I’m Sara. Remember me?”

“Hard to say. You all look alike.”

Why am I telling you this? To prove I am now a penitent and changed man? Sorry, that’s another conversation. No, this is about my father, and his lethal underwear. 

Let me say up front, I mostly disliked him. Translation: I idolized him and suffered his follies; moreover, I suffered feeling to never rise to his expectations, while simultaneously aware that his benchmark fell well below the expectations I came to claim for myself.

Say that three times fast, Dr. Freud.

Staring at his body, crumpled on the green shag that should have been replaced before Mom lingered and died in this very room, his underwear around his left thigh, his right big toe still cupping the waistband, I thought: OK, you got what you deserved. A ridiculous death. A pitifully funny death. A death polite people will say was tragic, only then to turn their backs and snicker.

When he was at the summit in my eyes, he took me hiking, up a mountain of switchback trails that was like walking the wrong direction to hell: it was hot, it was monotonous. He’d forgotten to bring water. Finally, at the top, he said: “That’s it,” and we headed back down.

That’s what I thought: that’s it. That’s how it ends: too stupid to get your big-ass big toe through your JCPenney whites.

Still, seeing any man, let alone your father, stiff on the floor, blood around his head making the green shag look shit-brown, and the spot where he’d pissed himself a darker shade of green (did I mention, it occurred to me that this was the first time I’d ever seen my father’s penis?) – it’s an intimate thing. No understatement there. As detached as I felt just then, I also felt closer to him than I had in as long as I could remember. 

About the penis thing: how was that possible? When I was a boy, hadn’t we changed in the pool locker room together? If so, wouldn’t it be natural to steal a furtive glance, if only to get a bead on my inheritance? It struck me: all the things we must have not done together, or had done and I’d forgotten, willfully or otherwise.

 Too late now.

The truth is, he wasn’t a bad guy. Entirely. The off-color jokes and the sometimes seismic rages (did I mention those?) were not all there was. I had an imaginary friend, Georgie LaForgie, whom he would ask about and I would make up outlandish stories, and my father would laugh until he cried, which made me laugh until I cried. He liked to fart and ask: “did somebody step on a duck?” I still say this, in the same silly voice he always adopted. A couple of times, he put his arm around me, seemingly for no reason at all.

When they were about to carry off his body, pinched as though he were trying to form the letter K, the medic removed a scissor from his hip holster to cut off Dad’s underwear. 

“Please,” I said, “Don’t cut them. Please, can you slide them off?”

Want to talk about intimate? Watch a strange man slide off your father’s last pair of underwear….

They are in a pine box on a shelf, next to the picture of Mom and a baseball signed by Jim Bouton and a paperback of the The Bell Jar that I never read in high school but stole a copy of anyway.

My sister, all she got were his ashes.

Fish Bowl

DS Levy’s work has been published in New Flash Fiction Review, Little Fiction, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Columbia, South Dakota Review, Brevity, The Pinch, and others. Her collection of flash fiction, A Binary Heart, was published by Finishing Line Press.

He volunteered to help with the senior Key & Scroll dinner and ended up following her around all night long. “Alison. Please.” She looked up and saw him motioning for her to open the door. She started the car and turned the AC on full blast. He tapped on the glass. She stared straight-ahead, breathing hard. Sweat rolled down between her bare thighs and down the back of her T-shirt. The air grew cooler, and then was cold. He tapped the glass harder. “Please, Alison, just open it.” He pursed his lips, like a fish coming up for air. At first, she had tried to be nice and not embarrass him in front of other people. Her mother had warned: “Sometimes when you’re nice, they think it’s more than that.” Now he was using his fists, leaving greasy marks on her passenger window. She put her foot on the brake and shifted into drive. Surely, she thought, he felt the car shimmy, the engine throttle. “Alison, I want to talk to you. I need to talk to you.” She let up on the brake and the car crept forward. He pounded the door, punched the aluminum frame. She’d felt sorry for him and tried to pull him into her coterie of friends. But he’d shied away, and they had too. “He’s weird,” they’d whispered. At school, he slipped a handwritten note in her locker, a verbose, dorkified thing in which he proclaimed “a strong affection” and wondered if she would “do him the honor” of going on a date. She ignored him. He began to stalk her on social media and she’d let him hang around for a while, a harmless cyber barnacle, but then his online presence began to cast a pall, and worrying for her safety she deactivated all of her social media, letting him off the hook. A few days later, he’d cornered her in the cafeteria, accusing her of ghosting him. She tapped the gas and the car lurched forward. He threw himself over the hood and hung on to the ledge near the windshield wipers. As he turned to face her, his blue and white ski cap fell off. He smiled manically, flashing teeth that reminded her of the spiny dogfish shark she’d dissected in biology class. She went faster. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, and when he turned back, she saw that he was crying. “Please! Alison, I love you!” Repulsed, she flipped on her wipers. They scratched his white knuckles. Still, he held on. Now, she punched the gas, letting out the line, and then slammed on the brake, reeling him in, then accelerated again. This time, he let go. She stopped. He was on the ground, flapping around like a fish out of water. Her wipers still waved back and forth, her foot quivered nervously over the gas pedal. 

Who’s the Boss? Me, I’m the Boss

Eric Andrew Newman lives in Los Angeles with his partner and their small dog. He works as an archivist for a nonprofit foundation by day and as a writer of flash and micro fiction by night. He has been nominated for the Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction anthologies, and his stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Atlas and Alice, Bending Genres, Ellipsis Zine, Five:2:One, Pithead Chapel and wigleaf. He’s at work on his first collection of stories.

People liked to call Bruce Springsteen “The Boss.” This always made my father angry. When someone referred to Bruce as “The Boss” in his presence, he would say, “Who’s he the boss of? He’s not the boss of me. No one’s the boss of me.” It should be said that my father ran a small printing business and was his own boss. My father was drafted into the army in the 60’s and ever since then, there were two things he hated above all else: waiting in line and being told what to do. Ever since then, he planned his entire life around being his own boss. Strangely enough, my father loved the 80’s T.V. show “Who’s the Boss?” He liked that it was posited as a question, a question he could answer with, “Me. I’m the boss.” He thought Tony was a bit of a fruitcake, but liked that Angela had her own job and wasn’t a drain. My father thought everyone should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get a job. Everyone should be their own boss.

Generic Brand

Lucy Zhang is a software engineer and holds a B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science. She watches anime, writes poetry and fiction (when patient enough), and sleeps in on weekends like a normal human being. She can be found at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter (@Dango_Ramen).

I am told to buy a cheaper cereal because cornflakes are too expensive and there should be a generic brand further down the aisle on the lowest rung–one of the knocked-over boxes behind the more popular Cheerios knockoffs, or better yet just get rolled oats. But oatmeal requires work: you need to cook it with water–quite pricey in drought-prone areas and the stove generates heat, which is the last thing you want to do in the summer where the AC should only be cranked on when you can slide on the sweat of your feet. 

Oh dear, are you ok? You look like my sister’s friend’s daughter–all skin and bone. I have a box of cereal, sugar-free jello, and rice cakes and after considering that I did just save some money on the cereal, I toss in a pack of cigarettes. The items move down the checkout counter, modeling their curves and edges, their nutritional labels and marketing brands, their price and crime handled one by one in the cashier’s hands. I never know what to say, but it is easy to feign my smartphone’s seduction–kids these days have eyes for ears.

Please give me some space, let me self-destruct in private. There’s that heatwave you encounter leaving a tundra of a grocery store and emerging under the sun whose rays bake skin and scorch hair. But the heat smooths the goosebumps on my arms and warms my skin, an embrace without the skin-to-skin nonsense. I can’t even find a ten-cent Box Top on this cereal box to give kids who’ll accept free stuff from strange women who wear socks with their flip flops and Dalmatian sweaters with dress pants. They still collect Box Tops these days right? I recall that teachers pit students against one another in a capitalist microcosm and the class that yields the most Box Tops gets a pizza party. Of course, pizza needs the status of Universal Incentive, which overlooks the kids who sit cross-legged on the octopus-patterned carpet, playing cat’s cradle by themselves in a dexterous maneuver of string using hands and mouth, silently valuing personal space over the pushing and shoving to retrieve a slice of over-cheesed dough. Maybe these kids also get fake cornflakes without Box Tops and green Cornelius Roosters flaunting their red crowns, crowing in the morning as though everyone should be crowing with the same barnyard vitality. No thanks. I don’t think I’m too expensive, plus I like to clean and cook and make a decent sex buddy. But I got the fake cornflakes, so don’t touch me tonight.