Styx Grocery

Try as I might, I can’t recall how I got here. Styx Grocery is completely empty. Completely silent, save for the whooshing of the wind and the snow outside. The lights are dim and occasionally flicker with an electronic pulse that sends shivers up my spine, with that John Lennon song playing quietly over the PA. The shelves are bare and the freezers in the back empty, and it’s so cold in the store that my fingertips turn blue.

I press my fingers into my temples and retrace my steps to find exactly how I got here, but there’s nothing. My last memory...my last memory is going to bed last night. Perhaps this is a dream; But when I pinch myself, I don’t wake.

I instinctively wander over to Aisle 13. I feel as though I’ve been here a thousand times before, but I can’t remember what belonged here.

I try the front door. To my surprise, and relief, it opens, letting in a blast of frigid air and ice particles that stab me like itty-bitty needles on my cheeks and nose. I breathe shallow air into my lungs, and ball my fists together and tighten my eyes, prepared to run through the snow back home, but an ear-piercing wail freezes me.

“Huh?” I turn on my heel and see a bundle of blue blankets rustling where I stood only moments ago. It whimpers, then cries pathetically. I release my grip on the door and let it close, and carefully approach the thing and pick it up tenderly, laid across my arms with its head in my hands. 

It looks up at me and screams as if it’s in extreme pain. I stiffen with newfound panic and look around the deserted store, down the bare lanes, for parents of this thing. I never had children. They’re demonic to me, and this one is no exception. 

“Hello?” I ask onto the empty aisles, over the shrieking of the baby. My voice is swallowed into Lennon’s voice.

A strangely familiar bell tings behind me and draws my attention from the child. On the other side of the store, a little boy rides his bike between corridors, laughing loudly, echoing off the walls, completely ignoring the baby’s wailing.

“Hey!” I shout. “Is this…?” The baby silences like he’s been snuffed out. My ears ring in the absence of his wails. I look back at him, only to see that the baby has vanished, my fingers clenched around his blanket. 

Wha-

Oh, my God. 

At first, I fear I’ve dropped the baby, but as I unwrap the bundled blanket, a pile of snow falls to the floor. I fall to my knees and dig through the snow, and the boy on the bike tings his bell again, unconcerned with the disappearing baby. I look up at him and finally get a good glimpse of his face. He gives me a mischievous grin that stops me in my tracks. 

He’s me. 

Not me now, obviously, but me at about 8 years old. Wearing my sneakers and my school uniform, soaked with mud at the ankles with holes in the knees. Riding a blue Huffy Thunder Road just like the one I crashed into a tree at the bottom of the hill in summer, complete with the lightning bolt of chipping paint.

He stops just a few feet away from me, meets my eye with a little knowing twinkle. And then, like a flash, he rides off again, ringing the bell and giggling his little head off. My feet move underneath me and my fingertips catch up to him and grasp his coat, and he too vanishes, falling into a little pile of snow on the ground. The bike bell lands daintily on top with a ghost of a ring.

“No!” I cry out and collapse on the floor of the store. I swallow and draw myself to the wall of the store, the hum of electricity even louder. The song on the radio ends, and the opening of the John Lennon song starts up again. Of all songs, why does it have to be this one? I catch my breath and glance at the door again, and as I’m about to make a break for it, I hear something that stops me. 

Someone plays the guitar, badly, around the next aisle. I push myself to my feet, albeit legs trembling and brows permanently etched together like they’re tied with a bow, but shoulders squared up and fists balled in case I have to fight somebody. 

A teenager sits on an invisible bed with a faceless girl sharing a guitar between them. He’s me too. I recognize my floppy haircut from high school that I thought was just so cool, my skinny arms and neck. He charmingly smiles at her and tells her she’s “doing so well!” Then they’re kissing.

Another version of me appears a few feet behind him, this time wearing a blue cap and gown at his graduation, accepting a diploma from a featureless man, and an invisible audience cheers him on. 

And another version on the other side of me wears a suit while a bride floats down an aisle to him. I stumble backward and steady myself on one of the empty shelves. 

The child appears again near the door, sat on the ground with my bike beside him, screaming over a bloodied knee. The scar on my knee twinges with the memory. The baby screams from somewhere in the store. The store buzzes. The couple giggles. John Lennon sings.

On the other side of the store, I- no, it’s not me, it’s the ghost of me- The ghost of me antagonizes and waves a finger at a much larger man with tattoos until the man throws him to the ground and beats him to a pulp. A few feet away, I lie bloodied up in a hospital bed. I remember that. My bride holds my hand, crying. I don’t remember that.

Another teenage version of myself drinks so much liquor that he throws up in the street while his friends laugh at him. 

The bride screams at him. She tells me I have to stop. Stop what, I don’t know. I look at myself for a response and only see dead eyes. To my horror, he picks up a glass bottle and throws it at her. 

No! 

The bottle hits an invisible wall near her head and shatters and turns into snow, landing on the ground. The bride looks as though she could cry. I want to reach out to her. I want her help in figuring all this out. She’s smart enough that she could tell me how I got here. I look back at my own face. He’s blank. He’s stoic. He feels nothing. 

I shake with anger and my fist flies out, but the moment I make contact, he dissolves into snow. 

“Damn it!” I shout in frustration, and I turn to my bride. “I’m sorry,” I mumble, but she stares at the space left behind by the memory, instead of meeting my eyes. I reach up and touch her cheek, and she too falls into a pile of snow.

“No!” I spin on my heel and look around. There are so many of these ghosts that there’s no room to even move.

My golden retriever bounds toward me with his tongue flapping in the wind. He tackles a boy, me, with a hat on and steals the hat from right off his head. Headlights flash across the ceiling and brakes screech, and the dog turns into a pile of snow with a whimper.

The memory in the cap and gown hurls insults at my mother and points a finger in her face. “I wish I’d never had children,” she spits back at him. Doors slam in every direction. 

There are four or five versions of me cheating on girls who didn’t deserve it.

High school teachers attack my intelligence and the class laughs at me. Words overlap and become just background noise filling the store like being in a crowd that I can’t escape from.

A funeral procession buries my father, and my stoic figure doesn’t shed a tear. He pulls a flask from his pocket and drinks from it.

Feel something! I want to scream at him. I find steadiness on the floor of the store, and I want nothing more than to sink into it. I hide my face in the vinyl flooring and cover my ears and my eyes and scream to drown it all out, but it must encourage these ghosts because they get even louder.

So, so many liquor bottles scatter the floor of the grocery store. As I grasp them in my fingers, they’re all empty. Every single one of them. 

That’s what I came here for. I came here for a drink. I remember!

I push through the images, and they turn into the mist and the snow, but they don’t go away. They’re in my head, louder and louder until they’re as much a part of me as my heartbeat. 

I run out of the store, not caring how the snow soaks my shoes or how the wind bites at my exposed skin. I have to get away. 

But there’s no road. There are no buildings or signs. It’s white and grey as far as the eye can see, except for a small black figure near the ground in the distance, and another person hovering over the other. The wind nearly blows me away, and the snow hits the side of my face like knives.

“H-help me!” I scream, stumbling toward the person. “Please!” The person looks at me, then runs in the opposite direction. “Wait!” I shout. I stumble and fall to my stomach, but push myself up. I’m out of breath as I come closer to the crouched shadow, but when he comes into view, my heart sinks into my stomach and all exhaustion goes out the window.

It’s another version of me, dressed in the same clothes I wear now. His hair is styled the same except for the icicles frozen to the tips of his hair and eyelashes. I reach out and brace myself for him to disappear like the others did, but he doesn’t. He’s stiff as a board and blue in the face. He’s frozen solid. He’s dead. 

Am..am I dead?

The wind whips me back and forth and I remove my hand from the body. My body. This can’t be real. Trembling, but not from the cold. The bicycle bell rings behind me, and I can still hear the John Lennon song playing despite being out of earshot of the store. The boy rides on the bike, giggling, an echo against the wind, and the music. One of them shouts something that I don’t hear over the wind. No. They can’t get me. They can’t have me.

I push myself to my feet and run. I run far away from the store and the body and the boy. “Somebody, help me!” I yell. My lungs ache. A dim blue light appears in the distance. I gasp and stumble my way through the snow until the light comes into view, with one of the letters blinking it’s last light before it dies. It illuminates the snowfall around it. The little building attached to the light beckons me inside. Safety from what I’m running from. I find my way inside and stand in the center of the room.

But try as I might, I can’t recall how I got here. Styx Grocery is completely empty. Completely silent, save for the whooshing of the wind and the snow outside. The lights are dim and occasionally flicker with an electronic pulse that sends shivers up my spine, and that John Lennon song plays quietly over the PA.