Hey Cats and Kittens. You’re probably here because you’re interested in writing, so here’s some of my work. Now I’m Lost In The Supermarket was recently published in Nonymous. The other piece is an excerpt, roughly what the opening of the book that I’m writing looks like, assuming I don’t make any huge changes to the plot. Which I probably will. The book will absolutely not be called Thunder Mountain Dance Party. It just helps to have a working title, sometimes.
Now I’m Lost In The Supermarket
I’m considering the melons that are available to me when I spot Kelly Stover coming through the door. He’s got one of the big wide carts and he’s heading straight for the salad kits. He blows right past the bottled fruit smoothies and the vegetarian meat substitutes. He hefts a big bag of mixed greens into his cart and moves on to the bell peppers. I put the honeydew that’s in my hands down into my cart, the smaller, squarish kind, and push the cart over to an end-cap to pick up a crate of clementines before I move on to the bakery section.
This happens every time. It doesn’t matter when I go to get my groceries, Stover is there. Morning, noon, night, weekend, weekday, he’s always there. One time I even tried walking a little further, to the other supermarket, and he was there too. Ground beef was on sale that day, that may have influenced him. So were lemons, but I’ve never seen him buy anything citrusy.
He must get groceries every day. I know he’s fat, but he can’t possibly eat that much, can he? I guess his family is pretty big too, but still. That’s just an insane amount of food that they’re going through. Entire villages could be fed for months with their weekly diet.
The intercom muzak cuts out, and a distorted voice starts to inform me of rosemary mint lamb racks that my family will just love. I can’t ignore the voice because it’s so loud, but there’s no way I’m buying my family a rosemary mint lamb rack. They’re doing plenty fine with their weight control kibble. Mittens is finally down to twelve pounds, which technically makes her a medium-sized cat. I’m so proud of her. She was nineteen pounds when I took her in, and she just couldn’t keep up with Frisky, who’s also twelve pounds, but he’s pure muscle, sleek, and full of energy. He’d never admit it, but I think Frisky is pretty proud of Mittens too.
I pick up a garlic piccolo loaf and put it in my cart. I want to go for the bagels, but I can see Stover is coming this way. So I resign myself to getting croissants again, because they’re closer, and getting them will allow me to make a quick getaway to the seafood. And I like croissants, so it’s not like I’m going to suffer. It’s just that I happen to crave bagels sometimes, and this happens to be one of those times.
I think it’s a weekend thing. I like having bagels on the weekend. I like sleeping in, just an hour or so, not too late, then staying in my pajamas for a while. I’ve got time to wear slippers on the weekend, warm, fuzzy slippers. I can get up, put on my slippers, pet the cats and make sure they’ve got fresh food and water. I can sit with the cats and wait while my bagel is toasting, smell it, wait for the ding at the end of the toaster oven’s timer. Then I’ll spread cream cheese on the warm bagel, and Mittens will jump into my lap and she’ll sniff at my plate while I’m taking my first bite, and she’ll lick at the cream cheese at the edge of the second bagel slice. She’s a good kitty, so I’ll let her indulge a little bit before I set her back down on the floor.
I’ve got my shrimp and my frozen haddock fillets, and I’m heading into the aisles. Nothing to see in the first aisle, just energy drinks and fake juice. The second aisle, though, there’s low-sodium popcorn there, and ginger beer near the end of it.
But then there’s Stover. He’s caught up to me, his mammoth cart already full enough to feed me for a week. As I’m reaching over to pick up my ginger beer, he overtakes me, the front left corner of his car slamming into the front right corner of mine, which causes my cart to bang up against the shelf.
No sorry, no excuse me, no acknowledgement. He just keeps going.
Stover was the same way in high school. He’d bump into me, and plenty of the other kids in the hall, and he never once stopped to apologize. Eventually I learned to just stop telling the teachers. They spoke to him about it at first, but nothing ever came of it, and after the third or fourth complaint, they stopped bringing it up with him. After the sixth complaint, they stopped listening to me.
It makes sense to me now why they would. I do the same thing with Frisky. He likes to try to get in the cupboard under the sink in the bathroom. If he gets in there, he’ll chew the toilet paper rolls, and pull stuff out. One day I came home to find a trail of cotton swabs that lead from the cupboard to the shoe box that he sleeps in by the big picture window in the living room. I used to spray him with water when I caught him trying to get into the cupboard, but after a while I realized that it just wasn’t deterring him. That’s when I started leaving the bathroom door shut at all times. Some cats just never learn. Sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands.
Stover and I leapfrog through the aisles. I pick up pasta sauce and canned tuna, crackers and pickles, oregano and coffee. He hits my cart every time he passed me, but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to stop for my coffee, half a pound of Kenya AA, which I grind for espresso using the in-store grinder. He picks out cases of macaroni and cheese, canned meatballs in gravy, a tub of shortening.
The meat department is along the back wall of the store, and we’re both in the habit of shopping through it as we came out of the aisles. Pre-cooked mild Italian sausages are on sale. Stover picks up two family packs of T-bone steaks and three hams.
Stover is ahead of me when we get to the first frozen food aisle. It’s a wide aisle, and there are paper towel displays set up in the middle just inside either end. He goes right towards the microwaveable dinners, so I go left towards the frozen mixed vegetables. I prefer fresh vegetables, of course, but I have found a really nice frozen mix with peas, carrots, spinach, red and yellow peppers, and mushrooms. It’s good for the nights that I’m in a hurry.
Just as I’m about to carry on toward the last aisle, the dairy section, Stover pins my cart up against a freezer door, and stands in front of his own cart, leaning against it, while he reaches for a jumbo bag of fries. I can’t pull my cart back, and I certainly can’t push it forward through him and his cart.
It’s time to shut the bathroom door on Stover.
“Hey,” I say to him.
He says nothing in response. He looks at me and moves his cart away, but then stops again, blocking the width of the aisle. He’s picking out a frozen pizza.
I turn my cart around, determined to come back to this aisle after I’m done getting my milk and yogurt. But I can’t do it. I won’t break my routine any more for Stover. I have to make a stand.
I leave my cart by the display of paper towels at the aisle’s entrance. The package claims that they’re environmentally friendly, partially made from recycled materials, but I’m pretty sure it’s all just green-washing. I grab a package of maple-flavoured bacon from my cart and walk over to Stover. I take the bacon in both hands, because years of playing Dungeons and Dragons has taught me that using a weapon with two hands will do fifty percent more damage, and I swing for him. The bacon slaps satisfactorily against his cheek, and his face is still jiggling as he shouts “what the Hell?”
He’s got two frozen pizzas in his hand, and he swings back. I duck in time. He loses his grip on one of the pizzas and it lands near my cart.
I run back, trying to get at the pizza, because it’s heavier than the bacon and I think it’ll make a more effective weapon. One of his hams flies past my shoulder and lands in the cart of another shopper. I can’t see her, but I hear her startled cry and she abandons the cart. I’m blocked in.
I try to spin my own cart around behind me, but I tip it over in the process. All of my groceries are on the floor, the clementines and crackers landing in the no man’s land between us, the pickle jar shatters, and another of Stover’s hams bounces off one of my cart’s wheels.
I don’t have time to wonder if that’s how cart wheels tend to get broken. I rip into the plastic of the underside of the frozen pizza and slide my hand inside, so I can use it as a shield. I’m about to make a dash for the clementines, which are still mostly in their crate, when Stover opens up a small package from his cart, and looses its contents on the floor between us.
Thumbtacks. I didn’t even see him pick anything up in the stationary aisle.
I hunker down behind my toppled cart and throw a can of tuna at him. It misses, impacting off of one of the freezer doors. Abandoned carts are starting to gather behind him as other shoppers are fleeing the scene, and I can hear the same happening behind me. Stover throws a bottle of extra virgin olive oil at the floor. I use the pizza to shield my face from the glass. It’s cold against my skin, and I regret not picking up the ovens mitts that I’d been eyeing in the kitchen accessories section. They would keep my hand warm, and there was a pair with cats on them, and one of the cats reminded me of Mittens.
I think of poor Mittens and poor Frisky as I dodge a rosemary mint lamb rack. Who will take care of them when I’m gone?
I throw my bread and my sausages and my coffee, but they prove ineffective. I haven’t got much that’s easily thrown, and Stover is powerful enough to launch anything in his cart at me. My only hope is if I can get to the clementines. They’re small, but they’re really round, and if I can get the plastic off of them I should be able to rapid fire them at Stover.
I hurry away from my cart, into the no man’s land. I slow down so I don’t slip, but it’s no use. I land on my side and I can feel the thumbtacks and broken glass piercing my skin. I can just reach the clementines though, with my pizza shield hand. I grab on to them with that hand, and with the other I grab the freezer door next to me. It’s slippery too, but with Frisky’s persistence I manage to get the door open and my hand inside. I grip the door frame and pull myself back towards my cart. I get back to my feet when I clear the olive oil patch.
I grab the multi-tool from my belt and use its blade to cut open the clementine crate. Once the plastic is wide open, I fold the blade and put the multi-tool back in it’s holder. Then I set my sights on Stover.
He’s reaching for his last ham. I grab a clementine and throw it as hard as I can. I catch him in the jowls. He hesitates, and I launch another clementine, and another, and another. He gets the ham into the air, but his aim is poor because he’s trying to dodge my onslaught of clementines.
I hit him in the gut a couple of times, and once on the ear. I would have hit him in the throat if he hadn’t moved his head down in time. I don’t notice until then that there are extra arms coming up under his armpits, and two cops are trying to bring him to the ground.
I turn to run, but they are behind me too. My throwing arm is already raised, but I drop my clementine and let it roll away as I raise my pizza shield arm. One of the police officers takes the pizza away from me, and then puts that arm behind my back, and then the other, and hand-cuffs me. Stover and I are lead out of the store, put into separate cars, and the cops drive us away.
This work by Mike Romard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
*****
Excerpt from Thunder Mountain Dance Party
He was an explorer, both by nature and by trade. He had been the world over, to every continent, even Antarctica on one occasion, and he has travelled by means of ship and by train, by automobile and by dirigible, by beast and by submarine, by plane and by foot.
He was on foot, jogging, almost skipping, past sausage carts, past Mediaeval stone buildings that had been converted into apartments and retail space, past wide-eyed innocent by-standers. He couldn’t place himself, exactly, not being able to get a good look at anything written, also unable to hear any distinct words spoken. He guessed that he was somewhere in Eastern Europe, perhaps Prague, but he couldn’t be certain without slowing down.
He wasn’t going to slow down. He couldn’t. He moved as fast as his 12-foot tall plastic building block man frame would carry him. He had a bouquet of plastic white daisies in his plastic yellow hand. These were meant for his one true love, a terrified woman running some distance ahead of him, always near the edge of his vision, just far enough away that he could just barely make out that it was her, and moving just fast enough that he was gaining no significant ground.
High-energy music in a major key woke Ren from this dream. He groped for his phone and tapped at the touchscreen until the noise stopped. It was six-thirty on a Monday morning, and Ren’s day was off to as good a start as he could manage. He prefered music to an alarm, and had long ago learned to avoid having a purely random song wake him up. Waking up to anything in a minor key, the negative and depressing keys, tended to be the start of a bad day, so Ren had made a playlist of songs in major keys that he really liked, and set his phone to play a random selection from it when the alarm went off.
Ren sat up and rubbed his face with both hands. He slid on his penguin slippers and stomach growled.
“Bagel,” he said.
Ren picked his glasses up off of the night-stand. He switched them on, and watched his cell phone’s screen for a widget to indicate that the glasses were online. The widget was a rotating gear while the connection was being established, followed by a picture of a vintage pair of brass steampunk goggles when the glasses were connected.
When he saw the goggles, Ren typed a couple of quick commands into the phone, and then put on his glasses. He then made his way to the kitchen, and picked through his cupboards until he found some flax seed bagels. A quick scan with his glasses showed that the bagels were still fresh enough, so he sliced one of them and put it into his toaster. While he was waiting for it to brown, he routed through his refridgerator and pulled out some butter and a can of artificial mango flavoured energy drink with whey protein. The toaster popped, he buttered his bagel, and he ate it over the sink so he wouldn’t have to dirty a plate.
Ren took his energy drink into the shower with him. He left his phone and his glasses on a shelf that had been built into the wall above his toilet. He washed himself quickly, finished his drink, and fnished grooming himself. He grabbed his phone and put his glasses back on, then he went back into his bedroom to get dressed. He put on a simple black suit with a light green shirt and a paisley tie that didn’t really go well together. He managed to make it look good anyway. He wore a utilibelt as well, with a small toolkit built into the belt buckle, but his coat was long enough to keep this hidden.
He dropped his phone into his pleather messenger bag. He slung the bag over his shoulder. He went back into the kitchen opened the refridgerator and grabbed the lunch that he had made for himself the night before. He put this into the messenger bag as well. He walked over to his front door, put on his shoes. He exited the apartment, and as he shut his door he heard the lock engage itself. He jogged down the stairs, out the door, and to his public transportation stop, arriving just as the bus did.
Ren swiped his bank card at the scanner as he boarded the bus. A green light flashed to let him, and the bus driver, know that his account had been debited for his fare. He found a seat about halfway down the length of the bus. He sat, took his phone out of his messenger bag and put on a set of headphones. He queued up a playlist on his phone, and spent his commuting time checking his e-mail and a couple of social networks, as well as getting caught up on a bit of reading and to check the day’s Homeland Security rating. It was an orange alert day.
This work by Mike Romard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
