Making Soup

“I’m making soup.”

The customer’s face was drawn, the color mostly drained away with only a few blemishes and zits bringing splashes of red to an otherwise pasty and featureless expanse, a human salt flat that would doubtless become slick and reflective in the rain. His eyes somehow looked in two directions at once, not cross-eyed, more a human tuatara surveying the magazines by the grocery counter. One eye lolled over at “Snakes of Central Texas”, a handy laminated brochure designed to remind you which one kills a fellow and which one is a friend of Jack (presuming you’re carrying the critical document at the time of envenomation). The other eye rolled over and landed on a celebrity tabloid, the kind that tells you who is having a baby with whom, 40 guaranteed secrets to lose weight (presuming you have the time and resources of a Hollywood hobnob), and who is off to rehab for the 7th time this year to kick their crippling addiction to addictions. Not the kind that tells you what Bat Boy is up to and who in the monarchy is actually a lizard person. As the checker recalled, they’re all lizards nowadays. They probably always were.

The checker missed those tabloids. There was nothing like a Weekly World News to spin up the kind of conversations she liked to have at the checkout counter. It had been at least 20 years since someone had mused out loud to her about where Bigfoot was today and what he might be doing with his Wednesday. 25 years since anyone had asked her what she thought about what really happened at Roswell, and whether they had moved Area 51 to a more secure facility deeper in the mountains and salt flats of Nevada. Now it was all hidden earbuds, loud phone conversations with disembodied entities, and the occasional celebrity gossip magazine tossed on the conveyor belt astride the American cheese slices, fruit roll-ups, and zero-calorie-zero-caffeine-but-probably-all-of-the-cancer colas, and the conversation had dried up like the desiccated banana slices available in bulk in the health-food aisle. The days had started their inexorable slide through November’s gluttony into December’s miasma of holiday nostalgia and refined sugars, and most of the people in her line would be these silent or distracted vessels, lost on the sea of their own aural ocean, adrift and directionless in a sea of impulse purchase candies and Time magazine retrospectives. No real conversation.

“I’m making soup.” 

A nervous cough, another darting of eyes, both now landing on a small laminated magazine with the image of Jesus, who looked inexplicably like Jared Leto, reaching a tender hand of mercy out to the reader, entreating them to abandon their Slim Jims and bagged pickles and climb through the checkout magazines into the promised land. His birthday is coming soon, and he wants you to celebrate it with him.

The checker looked at the basket. An onion. Bag of carrots. Cheapest-by-the-gallon chicken broth. A large quantity of industrial strength bleach. Celery sticks, pre-cut, ready to have peanut butter and raisins added, but no peanut butter or raisins present or accounted for. Drain declogger. A sad bag of generic brand brown lentils that had probably sat on the shelf for the last three years untouched by human hands and unspoiled by desire. Bouillon cubes. An avocado that wouldn’t be ripe for several days. More bleach. Making soup.

Soup was plausible, but the bleach and the Drano gave her pause. At what point is it a checker’s responsibility to check more than the groceries? The customer is always right, but is it okay to ask if the customer is alright? People get weird around the holidays, and then they get sad. Or maybe it was the other way around. The checker rolled this question over in her head a few times as she scanned the PLCs and sent the groceries further on their journey up the river and into the heart of darkness. Not my zoo, not my monkeys. I wonder what Bigfoot is up to these days?

The customer moved to the end of the belt and started sacking his own groceries, one eye now tracking a bustle of movement at the front of the store and the other a fly circling his head, as though he were going to lunge for it with a hidden frog tongue. He didn’t look like a danger to himself, the checker thought. Possibly a danger to others, but also probably not about to go home and make bleach and lentil soup as a last supper, his other human tuatara friends gathered on one side of a table, one ready to betray him and another ready to deny him. Did he have friends? The checker thought briefly about other strange juxtapositions in customer carts. Wasp spray and diapers. Cream cheese, condoms, and a cheap aluminum skillet. Marlboro Reds and enough chia seeds and wheat germ to fuel an entire yoga studio for a week. Candy canes, Oreo sandwich cookies, and replacement blades for a safety razor. Customers were all contradictions, puzzles to be solved by the casual observer trying to make sense of the richness of their inner lives through their one-time commerce. A series of processed foods, cheap sugar, various liver killing substances and libido enhancers and other quick fixes for the nutritional and emotional holes in their lives. A madlib of items that made sense individually and became emblematic of the chaos of existence when itemized on a receipt between a corporate header and a coupon for buy-two-get-one-free energy drinks. A present to be unwrapped and never re-gifted.

The checker imagined the customer chopping the onions, peeling the carrots, cleaning his toilets with the bleach, declogging his bathroom drains, then coming back to the soup to check it for salt. He must already have salt at home, because there’s none in the basket. Of course, everyone has salt at home, right? But there were no seasonings in the basket with the broth and the bleach. The basket isn’t a complete picture, she thought, just the missing pieces in a puzzle. A puzzle where I can’t see the box lid, can’t check it to know what picture it is we’re making. That’s all.

Her mind drifted back to the tabloids again, forming the imagined pictures of Weekly World News covers in her head. Human Tuatara can focus eyes independently. Frog Man snatches flies from midair with monstrous and grotesque tongue. Bigfoot spotted in grocery store checkout line buying religious paraphernalia. Man drinks bleach as part of balanced diet, says it keeps his skin healthy. Plumber unclogs drain, finds Bat Boy living in the p-trap. Man makes soup, uses plenty of salt he already had at home. Jesus celebrates birthday.

The customer paid in cash, grabbed his bags, and walked out of the store and into the night. The line of customers had grown long and serpentine as she daydreamed her way through the groceries, and snaked its way deep beyond the valley of the checkout into the ice cream canyons and near-frozen beer vaults. The next person’s items filed onto the conveyor belt and rolled towards the scanner. Chicken breasts, lettuce, a lantern battery, canned tomatoes, frozen corn, Jared Leto Jesus and his come hither hand, an at-home pregnancy test, several microwave dinners of various flavors, Reddi-Whip, a sympathy card for an unspecified tragedy, bouillon cubes again, an onion that had seen better days, garlic powder, no salt.

“Making soup?”