Buy, Buy Baby

It was snowing outside. That much Heather had expected. Vermont winters were marked by blizzards, snowflakes carrying on their New Year's parties well into February, drunkingly dancing in the wind and forgetting their responsibility to migrate further up north.

But the supermarket was empty. Heather had not expected that. Where were the toddlers, mid tantrum as they traumatise the fruit and veg aisle? Where were the old ladies struggling to read their own shopping lists, handwritten scrawls cruelly erased by the rain? Where were the cashiers cautiously counting out coins and staring at the clock willing the hands to move just a little bit faster?

Heather stopped in front of several hundred cans of baked beans. That really was weird. There was always somebody on the tills, someone waiting to take her money away and store it in one of those fancy boxes with the different compartments for each type of note or coin. She double checked. Nobody. Maybe they were short on staff because of the blizzard? But why would that singular employee leave the supermarket? It was too cold outside for a cigarette break and anyway, Heather is sure she would have noticed on her way in. If she can count on her brain to do one thing, it’s to spot a cigarette.

She turned away from the rows of beans, suddenly feeling very aware that they were laughing at her. She knew it was stupid, baked beans can’t laugh, but she wasn’t thinking rationally anymore, that little bit of fear had crept in, just enough to turn mild concern into paranoia. I should leave before the zombies get here, Heather thought, because if anywhere is a good place for a zombie apocalypse it’s an abandoned supermarket in the middle of a snowstorm. She headed towards the door, walking quickly but not quite running. 

Then her phone beeped. 

The familiar *ding* drawing her back to reality. There was no new text on the home screen, just that irritating red message reminding her that she only had 20% left and asking if she wanted to go into low power mode. No I do not want to go into low power mode Heather screamed internally at the phone, I’m in the bloody supermarket and there might be zombies hiding in the freezers. I need all the power I can get.

She glanced back at the door. The snow was getting heavier and there was no way she’d be able to make the drive back home until it cleared up. Maybe it would be safer inside the supermarket with the zombies than out there in the blizzard.

Heather laughed at herself, an almost thirty year old woman afraid of being alone in the supermarket, that was just stupid. And as for zombie apocalypses, they only occur in sci-films starring generically attractive and relatively famous actors and Heather definitely didn’t fit that bill. Everything was going to be fine. She ignored the no signal icon in the top corner, stuffed the device back into her pocket and carried on down to the meat aisle. 

On the shelves were all the usual items: rashers of bacon, twenty different varieties of sausage, chickens waited to be roasted and slathered in gravy and a baby. Heather paused. Somehow this didn’t seem surprising to her, after all she had just been imagining herself being eaten alive by zombies. But then the baby begun to wail and Heather was instantly reminded of all the reasons she never wanted to have a child. 

1. They cry. All the time. Like seriously, all the time. When she’s been round to her friends’ houses their kids haven’t stopped crying through all three meals of the day. 
2. They are heavier than expected and they don’t come with a sticky back label that tells you how much they weigh with instructions on how long that requires them to be stuffed in the oven for. 
3. They aren’t toilet trained. Which, quite frankly, is an evolutionary weakness in all humans. 

Heather lifted up the baby and was unpleasantly unsurprised that it fit all three of her criteria. It was still crying. It was heavy. And its nappy was soaking wet and smelt worse than the prospect of zombie brains. She placed it gently in the trolley, like she would the chicken that was sat next to the empty space on the shelf and continued down to the milk aisle.

That’s what all babies want, right? Milk. Heather picked the baby back up and placed it on the floor, allowing it to crawl over to the shelf and pick out which milk it wanted. Its chubby fingers manoeuvred over the caps. Red. Blue. Green. Brown. But they never stopped. They never found what they were looking for. Irritated, Heather bent down to the bottom level putting on that special baby voice that kids love and adults hate, especially adults who don’t have children and who don’t understand why anyone ever needs to coo. She asked the baby what it wanted and the baby responded, finally finding the right coloured bottle cap. Pink. And attached to Heather’s chest. 

No way. Heather stood back up considerably more quickly than she had crouched down there in the first place. This was taking things too far. 

She dumped the baby back in the trolley, pushing it like a pram as she crept back towards the tinned goods aisle. She was retracing her steps because that’s what the detectives always do in the crime shows she used to watch with her wife on Netflix. Fat lot of use those hours of binge watching were now. She could tell you how to get away with murder but what to do when you find yourself all alone in a supermarket with a hungry baby. 

The baby cried again, louder this time and with actual tears falling down its cheeks. Heather hated the part of her that instinctively felt a need to protect the one item in her trolley that she wouldn’t be able to eat for dinner. 

And then the lights went out. 

All of them, including the tiny ones in the floor that are supposed to stay on during power cuts. Heather had heard of this happening before, every winter there would be one story about a moment where a Walmart went into panic mode during a blizzard as all the mum’s used the moment of darkness to become chocolate bar thieves, but this was different. It felt different. It felt like something bigger than a power cut because power cuts don’t come with an empty supermarket and an abandoned baby. Maybe the zombies were still coming after all. 

Heather grabbed one of the tins of beans as a weapon, just in case things got even weirder, and hurried towards the door. She needed to get out of here. She would sit and wait in her car until the snow cleared and she would figure out what to do with the baby as soon as she got home. Her wife would have an answer. She was one of those people who was good in a crisis. Actually, she was one of those people who would never get herself into a crisis in the first place. 

Heather, the baby and the trolley full of food hurtled towards the doors and then paused, wondering if it was ethical to leave without paying seeing as there was no-one in the store to pay. Heather weighed up her options and then threw a bottle of wine and a tub of ice cream in besides the baby. But the door didn’t open. She stood there, with the baby crying and the beeping of the shop alarm but with no way out, no way to hit stop on the nightmare that was now being made worse by the awful melody that was blaring through the supermarket speakers. 

And then perhaps the most peculiar thing of all occurred. The baby placed its hands on the side of the trolley and clambered out, landing softly on the slightly sticky floor as if it was the simplest thing in the universe. Heather just stood there staring as it continued on its journey, through the scanners that check for stolen goods and out of the automatic doors that only a moment ago had refused to open for her. She went to run after it, a baby isn’t going to survive long in a blizzard, but it was gone. Vanished like a dream at seven o’clock in the morning. 

Heather blinked and stepped back into the shop. The lights had turned back on and as she spun around she noticed that there was now a young man sat on one of the tills chatting away to an elderly woman who needed help using her credit card. In fact, the whole shop was filled with people - well not filled, it was the middle of a blizzard, but there was a normal amount of people milling around the aisles. Heather shook her head, unsure of whether the baby had ever been real or if it had all been a figment of her imagination. But it felt real. It felt more real than the supermarket did now. 

She laughed to reassure herself that she was real and then walked out of the shop, climbed back into her car and drove away into the snow.