Lauren Gilmore: Products
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
____ PRODUCTS
James is putting the finishing touches on our shopping list, squinting and erasing like he’s perfecting the blueprints for a building. At a certain point, we started making them into maps. It just made more sense. Either jot down six different combinations of words that might align with the new signs, or just put lines for the aisles and a star halfway down to say here: cat food. At a certain point, I learned how to scan his hieroglyphics and translate them to objects in my head: ice cream, carton of eggs, green kale, red onion, Skittles, wine.
“The more you erase the harder it is to read.” I’m standing by the door, our reusable totes already over my wrist. He ignores me and keeps working.
“Well, last time you got asparagus instead of broccoli, so I’m trying to clarify.”
“You know—” I start, and then stop.
It doesn’t matter, though. His eyes dart up from the paper. “I know?”
“Nothing.”
“No, say it.”
“You could do it yourself.”
Now I’ve said it, and he doesn’t respond, though he does exhale a little too forcefully before handing me the list. I take it and wait, but he’s not going to say anything else. I glance down, flip the list over. I consider asking about something on the back, a place where his eraser marks have made a line blur like a light through freeway rain, then think better of it.
Outside, the snow is just starting, the sun a slow motion axe above the neighbor’s roof. I zip my coat up higher to my chin, shove the careful notes into my pocket and start down the street.
It started, of course, with tampons. You couldn’t put the word on the signs at the ends of the aisles, because it was too vulgar. We don’t need to be reminded of all that blood and menstrual business when we’re just after a six pack, they petitioned. Really, I didn’t want to have that conversation with my son, yet, but he’s learning to read and quizzical about everything. It was reasonable to come up with a code word, and then notify all the female shoppers on their way in the door. Tampons are under pistols. This worked so well that there were questions about condoms, then liquor (spirits didn’t quite cut it because then there were unnecessary discussions about ghosts and paganism). Lipstick, greeting cards, shampoo. Did we really need to be reminded of animal flesh? Of the non-stop need to keep eating and shitting and covering our eyelids with shimmer? Cosmetics are under shrapnel. Diapers were bombshells but because of the sexual connotation became prayers. Lotion became thoughts. Steak became freedom.
The code words had to get more creative, and it stopped impacting only female shoppers. Instead of whispering the words in your ear when you entered the store, they started handing out pamphlets. Those weren’t eco friendly, and also kids could read them anyway. They’d come up with something, though. In the meantime, we were all told to plan extra time to find what we needed. At first, the billboards outside promised a solution by the end of the summer, then the fall.
Now, they hadn’t updated any of the signs and as far as anyone could tell it was just getting worse. They tried grouping things by common letters in the original names, and then by shape, and then by size, and then by color.
Now, it’s a constantly evolving mess that we avoid at all costs.
Well, some of us avoid.
Some of us go once or twice a week. From our apartment, it’s six blocks along the arterial. I watch the snowflakes around my steps appear and vanish like kisses or something starting to boil underground. At least it’s not sticking. Last week, it rained on my way out and it took me long enough to get back that the layer of water had frozen solid and I dropped all of our blueberries trying not to fall. They rolled and scattered away, blending into the ineffective salt someone had scattered. Right then, I wanted to drop the rest. I wanted to slide the apples along like bowling balls. I want to dump the milk out, make a layer of ice cream. I wanted to tear open all the condoms and fill them with the asparagus that I already knew was supposed to have been broccoli. I wanted to lay on the ice sandwiched between the frozen asphalt and the faraway, gaping hold of the sky and let whatever might want to eat me. Instead, I let the blueberries fall, and I kept walking, and I told James they were out of blueberries without mold and he had forgotten he’d even asked for them. He didn’t forget about the broccoli.
At the store, the fluorescent light just above the door is flickering slightly. There’s a bent metal receptacle where they used to stack up the program guides for locating anything. I take out James’ drawing and hold it up to what’s in front of me.
Three aisles down, star on the bottom, and in impatient scrawl: pickles.
This is my life, I think for the third time today and start toward them. I pass three palettes of cereal lined up in random orders and an acne faced kid trying to sort them out. He mutters under his breath something about Fruit Loops, about Cheerios. He looks like the kind of person who, in two years, will be part of a college fraternity that drinks their cereal with beer and circulates their girlfriend’s nudes without consent. I act like I don’t mean to and drag my shoulder through the cereal, knocking over three boxes. I apologize.
He doesn’t look at me.
The pickles are not where the pickles should be even in James’ drawing. I have never told him this, but since he hasn’t been in awhile he doesn’t really know what it’s like here anymore. Nothing can be relied upon. Not signs, not memory, not intuition. Only chaos. I start walking in a different direction, nowhere near where anyone would think to find pickles, and then a little girl emerges from an aisle holding a jar in front of her.
“Excuse me, have you seen my—”
Before she can finish, I take the jar and toss it into my cart. A woman comes up behind her, glares at me, and takes the girl’s hand. “Come on, Emmaline.” Her voice is a flat hiss.
This is my life. I have pickles, now. Next—
I glance down at the paper and read frozen peas at the same time as I turn a corner and find a long freezer that looks promising. Tonight might go well after all. I try not to look too closely at anything in the freezer. It’s best not to walk too slow, or else someone could pillage what you already found and then you have to start all over. Happened to me like that a couple weeks ago. I wasn’t even looking for anything important, nothing on the list, just something I remembered having once when I was a kid, a specific kind of ice cream bar with strawberries suspended all down the middle and thin chocolate encasing the outside and two scrawny kids with blue dyed hair and eyebrow piercings took my bananas, my wine, and my head of butter lettuce. I never did find butter lettuce again before leaving.
“EMMALINE! Emmaline?”
Oh great. The mom’s back. I try to avoid eye contact, but she keeps shouting the kids name over and over. If she recognizes me from a few moments ago, she doesn’t act like it. Probably it’s buried under the panic. I want to tell her she should never have brought something she didn’t want to lose to a place where it’s impossible to find anything.
“Have you seen a little girl?”
She’s directly in front of me. Apparently, I was the easiest to stop. Two men flank me and keep going, speaking loudly about a ski trip.
“I haven’t seen anything.”
The woman could be my age. Her hair is a faded auburn that hasn’t been washed in a while, and she watches me with complete vacancy. “You have to help me. She’s only five. I turned around for two seconds, and she just—”
“You can’t look too closely for anything,” I say.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Won’t find her shouting her name.” I go to push my cart around her and she plants both hands down on either side of it.
“I need help. No one else will look at me.”
“I didn’t look at you.”
“You are now.”
She’s right, but only because she’s stopped square in front of me. She maneuvers her body so it’s directly at the end of my cart like a hippy protesting the sawing of a tree, and shoves the cart hard against my stomach. I stumble back slightly, so I’m pinned between her and the freezer behind me. I turn my head, trying to catch my breath from the impact, and my cheek rests against the cold glass. “There,” I cough, making a white cloud against it. I muster all of my strength left to press the cart away, slamming the woman, and then I open the freezer, and the girl comes running out, dropping a box of toaster waffles on the ground as she falls to her knees at her mom’s feet. She’s shivering. The woman picks up the box and the girl at the same time, and turns away, yelling vague threat after vague threat. The girl apologizes. Her teeth are chattering but she chokes out various words.
Stuck… I got stuck … closed behind … waffles.
I turn back toward the freezer door. I lean forward and exhale a white cloud. I place the tip of my finger against the glass, and then stop. I have no idea what to write. The cloud disappears, and I exhale a new one, and then stop to think. I still have no idea. I set the timer a third time, but whatever warmth my breath has lasts even less time, now. Three strikes. This is my life. I pull open the door. For a moment, the seal sticks, then the extra force makes it fly into me. Inside, I almost don’t fit. I have to knock away all of the mixed up bags of frozen fruit to straighten my arms. No, not fruit anymore. Endocarp, ovary, the marrow of another bone...
Lauren Gilmore is an incoming MA student in Lehigh University's Literature and Social Justice program. She studies horror, and does her best to make and write strange things. She is the author of a full-length collection of poetry, Outdancing the Universe, from University of Hell Press. Other creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Hayden's Ferry Review, Ghost City Review, and Rogue Agent. She has also written for Horror Homeroom. She lives with her partner and two small dogs. Website: laurengilmore.com
