Flash! Fiction by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

13

At the Grocery

An old guy wearing a gray plaid fedora and a khaki jacket raises his walking stick to point at an empty space in the dairy case. A tall skinny kid in a grocery apron re-stocks the adjacent yoghurt section from a precariously-stacked trolley.

“How can you have a special and run out on the first day?” com-plains the old man. The kid rolls his eyes and nods his head, not so much in agreement but as if to signal to the old man that he should find someone who cares. Meanwhile his movements between the trolley and the dairy case do not slow at all.

I wait, but nothing else is said. Looking ahead, I sense something familiar in the old man, but I can also still remember not long ago being the kid. Anyway, I don’t say anything. Never do. It’s compli-cated. I was once contemptuous, young, and ageless; and soon I’ll be irritable, old, and finished. Besides, what could I say?

“Razor Cotton? Wicked percussion, man!” I hear myself say to the tall skinny kid who, with his back towards me now, reveals a grue-some picture on his t-shirt.

“How about a couple of those Yoplaits?” I add.

Reaching towards the shelf, he opens his hand flat as if to make the entire display available to me and then turns abruptly to run after the old man.

“Hey, Sir? Lemme see if we’ve got that special somewhere in the back.”

“Don’t bother, son. Not supposed to have it. Clogs the arteries. You may have just saved my life, kid. How ’bout that?”