Rabbit Blood on Aisle 9

It was Jude’s idea to let the kid tag along. Why, was beyond him. There was a fundamental lack of understanding between him and the girl, and it wasn’t because of the generational gap bullshit that people were always going on about, it was because the kid was a stupid piece of shit. He sometimes looked at her and wondered how his sperm had ended up serving such a use.

Yes, the cantankerous-old-man trope fit him like a glove, and he relished it.

Food Mart trips could be dangerous, which is what he reminded Jude that morning as she served him news of the kid’s accompaniment along with his eggs. The eggs are overdone, is what he also told her, which she ignored because she was accustomed to his cantankerousness. But hey, he had an image to maintain. Regardless, Jude had decided that since his past several outings had gone without hiccup the delinquent would chaperone him on this one. He normally hated when people decided things for him, but since it was Jude he had only grunted and spooned eggs into his mouth, and that was his way of saying “fine, I love you”. 

The girl drove him to Food Mart! She was what, twelve? Not really, but he considered it a miracle that during her driving exam somebody decided that she was anything less than a danger to the public. He glanced down at the list Jude had written as the Prius jolted to a stop at an intersection. Long, slanting letters fell like dominoes across the back of an older Food Mart receipt. 

Avocadoes Potatoes Eggplant Tomatoes Broccoli Peppers MEAT Milk Yogurt BREAD Eggs Ding Dongs?? energy bevg bday cake

Energy “bevg”, really Jude, he would say when he got home. Could you show your age any more, it is an energy drink. And she would throw him a floppy grin and ignore him.         

Getting out of the car was surprisingly only a little bit of a struggle given the weather. Rather than helping him, which he would have hated anyway, the girl stood a few feet away and took a hit of her Juul. He stared at her blankly once he had made his way out, at her cheeks pink in the cold and at the fumes rushing out of her mouth. He wondered how much of her was him.

Food Mart was busier than usual, which could easily be attributed to the post-Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas shopping-spree spirit. Once they got inside the kid muttered something about getting the Ding Dongs and walked off, so he pushed their cart along to the produce section, walking at his usual lukewarm pace, his brain plodding along, his ears humming quietly. But! He was on guard, since he knew that Food Mart could be sly. It usually only attacked when he had forgotten it could. One visit it ambushed him in in the frozen food section, another in the cereal aisle. But despite this lurking threat, there he found himself, rummaging obligingly through the avocados like a rabbit napping in the prairie, practically begging for a fox’s jaws to close around its furry length.

The first warning sign was the lady at the butcher. He had collected the vegetables without incident, avocados and eggplant and potatoes and broccoli and peppers and tomatoes, and was actually starting to congratulate himself. The lady wore a hijab and had gorgeous blue-green eyes, long lashes too, and she pointed to his hat and said “thank you for your service”. 

He wore the hat today also because Jude told him to, the crazy bitch. But no matter, just five words the woman said, and he lifted up the corners of his mouth in a way that he hoped said “thank you pretty-eyed lady but I am a cantankerous old man with several issues and an image to maintain”. After they parted ways, her eyes lingered in his mind just long enough for him to start remembering other eyes like those, to feel his mind changing course, grinding down a gratingly familiar path. 

He hurriedly collected his brown-paper-wrapped packages before shambling along to the dairy section. 

The second warning sign was the phone alarm in the bread aisle. The plastic packaging along the shelves blared at him, colorful block letters boasting the sheer amount of whole grains in every loaf. Jude lived for this multigrain garbage. Himself, he liked it classic, soft, white, and absent of any visible grain whatsoever. In fact he had developed a theory that there was no wheat whatsoever in this fancy bread, just whole grains molded into the shape of bread slices, and this got a good laugh out of Jude.

As he reached for the white bread somebody’s phone alarm went off in the next aisle. A siren-like and persistent blaring. 

His hand made contact with the package and he took it down, holding it gingerly in both hands as instinct pushed up his heart rate and shot adrenaline into his too-old-for-this veins. A muttered “shit” and the alarm ceased. The rabbit in him opened its eyes, sat up, and twitched its nose. His feet were dead weights on the floor. Panic and dread like an aftertaste in the back of his mouth. He stared down at the bread bag between his hands, noticing that he had made finger-shaped dents in the loaf. Keeping his eyes on the bag, he fought his breathing back down. The panic lingered, deeper now, as if it had taken up residence in his lungs, his esophagus. He was certain the store had become drier and hotter. And so his brain ground further into its familiar labyrinth. And so the Food Mart trip had become a twisted adventure. He rolled the cart out of the aisle.

By the time he got to the eggs he had allowed himself some cautious optimism, since the excursion was winding to a close. While he was checking the contents of one of the cartons, the kid tapped him on the shoulder and showed him her Ding Dongs. I have no interest in your sugary fucking obesity-fuel, kid, he said with his eyes. “Hmmg”, he mustered up as a response. The kid, taking this in stride, tossed the package into the cart and left to get the energy drink, asking if he could pick a cake. It would be her friend’s birthday tomorrow and she was going to throw a surprise party, and could it be something yummy but also mature since they were no longer preteens.

Once at the bakery he stared long and hard at the cakes, trying to will himself to care about the kid’s friend’s birthday. He did not succeed. How could a cake be mature, he wondered, is carrot cake mature? 

He ended up picking a strawberry shortcake, which was thirty dollars, an absolute shitshow of a ripoff. He was about to tell this to the girl behind the counter, who noticed his hesitation and waited, powder blue glove hovering over the cake box. “Sir?” 

She had thick curly hair, brown eyes, eyebrows like thunder, small lips, and it couldn’t be but she was wearing the exact dress, the exact dress it seemed, checked gray and sleeveless under her white work apron. 

There were always different things he remembered but the dress was new, he had all but successfully erased memory of it until this blasphemy of a girl, whose eyes floated worriedly at him now. He saw blue-green eyes where hers were, heard the phone alarm siren careening through stale air, saw dried blood on a gray gingham dress, felt smoke stinging his eyes, no, he was not in Food Mart any longer. Panic leaped in his chest. He, the rabbit, had turned his round-cheeked head just in time to see the fox’s white teeth falling towards his own stupidly soft fur. Dread sank deep and fast as a counterweight to flying fear. He placed both hands flat on the glass surface of the display window as images violated him unbidden. 

He had cried over the girl behind the counter’s body because it was too dusty on the side of the road. Dust had gathered like snow on the eyelashes, eyebrows, arm and leg hair, and even the blood was dusty, which seemed to desecrate her body beyond desecration, seemed to place a load so unbearable on the world’s spirit that it plunged its hands into any nearby soul in sight and in blind raging grief ripped it wide. He had allowed himself less than a minute by her side before pushing further into the gray dread which cloaked the streets in search of his unit, or the men who remained with their blood still within them and not drawn out and dirtied so vulgarly as hers had been.

Shit, he thought, seeing his hands splayed on the glass and his ragged reflection peeking out from between the fingers. And so Food Mart had triumphed over him again! And so he was a bleeding rabbit. His breaths slowed as the store began to build itself new around him, but he could find no desire to move, not when blood and dirt and youth had been mixed so wrongly and so permanently. And so the trip to the grocery store ended. He had almost made it through the last item on blasted Jude’s list, but so the quest was cut short with him staring bewilderedly at the prisoner-cakes, perfect and unsullied with their proud pastel colors and stiff-peaked frosting. The kid ran towards him with her phone to her ear, a case of Monster Energy Drink lying forgotten on the linoleum floor.