Every trip to the organic grocery store is an event. I take my time. I wander the aisles. I check out the bread made to Biblical specifications, or the instant coffee that’s either made out of mushrooms or has mushrooms mixed in with it, or the sweeteners for people terrified of the sugar everyone has been eating for the last 10,000 years, but fine with eating the sugar we learned how to rape out of alcohol 20 minutes ago.
The automatic doors open and she looks at me. Up once. Down once. She gives me a half smile. I’m a middle-aged man desperate for human contact so I interpret this as sexual attraction rather than the Pavlovian reaction of a retail wage slave.
She looks like a cross between a stripper trying to look like librarian and a grown woman who never grew out of her teenage goth phase. Blue eyeshadow clustered in the corners of her eyes splashing color into the clear bits of her cat eye glasses. She’s shapeless in her baggy clothes but she moves like a pole dancer chained to a cash register. When she grabs items off the conveyor belt, I can tell she has a serious set of tits underneath that baggy t-shirt advertising a band she’s too young to have caught the first time around. Her skin is imperfect, pallid, dotted with adult acne and the scars that come with it. Oversized teeth jut out, pushing her full lips forward.
I’m just here to fill up my growler of kombucha, pick up a bottle of kefir for tomorrow afternoon and top up my sauerkraut supply. Gut health is so hot this year and I will put mine up against any other swinging dick in the Four Corners states.
A fat girl in a Hatebreed shirt restocks the dairy case. She’s not the hot kind of fat girl. She’s the kind of fat girl who thinks she’s a lesbian because she’s built like a linebacker and has the misfortune to be living through a period in human history where the men she’d normally marry and raise kids with can choke their dicks into early impotence with bimbo gangbang supercuts on PornHub.
I mumble my pardons and move around her to get my kefir.
At the end of the aisle, I pick up a loaf of bread made by a guy who spent a ton of time in prison. I choose the kind that has 21 different kinds of seeds on the crust and shuffle on to decide what kind of $4.99 a can tuna I will mix with an $11.99 jar of avocado mayonnaise for my daily lunch of two sandwiches. Every can assures me that it is line caught and sustainable.
The checkout lines are all the same length, so it isn’t weird when I choose the goth librarian stripper’s lane. She keeps looking at me like you look at the sun when you’re not trying to burn your retinas out. I can’t tell if she’s afraid of me or wants to fuck me. Probably both.
“Hi, sweetheart. My camouflage jacket and hood up over my head and sunglasses indoors at 6:47 PM in October might lead you to believe that I have come here to commit the latest and greatest mass shooting atrocity, but in fact I am a learned man with an interest in the philosophy of convicted terrorist Ted Kaczynski, the literature of noted masturbation enthusiast Michel Houellebecq and only the most intellectually advanced French National Socialist black metal bands around. I’m not going to shoot anyone, at least not until the power grid goes down and then, well, it’s eat or be eaten, isn’t it? You can buy in now and be part of the grooviest warlord harem this side of the Rio Grande. Are you into girls? Because if you are, that’s a bonus. Don’t worry, you don’t have to let me join in, I’m content just to watch, because actually I’m pretty lazy in bed and would rather have a half-assed wank while you and your sister wives do whatever the fuck it is that women get up to together when there’s not a cock involved. If you want to be kept constantly pregnant that’s likewise a bonus, because in the world to come children are a form of wealth. The boys will inherit our vast lands and the girls we can sell off to… whoever. I honestly couldn’t give less of a fuck. Now that I’m this close, I must say, I’m less confident that your lady parts are as doll smooth as is my druthers, but I’m willing to look the other way, because I think the prospect of being a bed wench to a fascistic maniac with no hobbies other than lifting dangerously heavy weights and fantasizing about nuclear hellfire is something that will appeal to you, sexually speaking, on a very primal level.”
“$68.75.” She smiles awkwardly, anxiously. “Do you need a bag?”
I go to hand her my card before I remember that we haven’t been handing cards to cashiers for about a decade now.
— No one respects women more than Dan Thrall, believe me.