Mid-July and the first real hot night of the summer. If she was here you'd have brought the air conditioner up from the basement, but you content yourself with the quiet and the drone of the fan. You don't really need much.
Tonight, the super market, two half-gallons of lactose free milk, two chicken breasts, and a box of Devil Dogs. You're singing twenty-nine dollars and an alligator purse. Small children notice walking past. Their heads turn all the way around at you. You unbutton the second button of your shirt and untuck it, feeling half drunk without having drank a drop. In the front of the store, the two lines are long - 9 pm, Friday night - staffed by two teenaged cashiers who want to be anywhere else.
The faces of the people are vacant, waiting on line for diminishing returns. Your time is running out even faster here, and breathing seems harder. Though you have nothing better to do, you will not spend it this way.
Swearing aloud down the aisle, disproportionally angry, you retrace your steps replacing each item exactly where you picked it up. You are not, after all, on the side of chaos. But you are making a stand for liberty.
You think about what losing a job at fifty means, about not belonging anywhere, and then revisit the thing about not really wanting to stay on the planet at all, but there is this agreement you've agreed to.
"U.S.M.C, motherfucker!" someone in your head laughs, "U Signed the Motherfucking Contract".
You march out of the supermarket, tall and slow, forsaking groceries entirely. The parking lot is darker and bleaker then when you came in. The sky above features an interesting dark cloud bank that seems a looming mountain range in the fading light. There's a high chunk of bright moon up there too.
