Doris needed to shop. There were things that she wanted to buy that she considered to be essential to her survival. Trees to breath, animals to pat, animals to eat, or pat then eat, socks to dance in and a steady stream of Cutty Sark. She’d had a lover once who introduced her to Cutty Sark. They drank whiskey on Tuesdays whilst guessing words on Wordle. They had long slender fingers that they kept to themselves and ideas so grand they spared no one. They touched rarely but eventually sparked a fire in the house.
One morning Doris awoke to find her lover gone. A bundle of clothes left on the floor, limbless. A shirt, reaching out along the floorboards. A sock hanging over the side of a chair threatening to jump and a singlet crumpled and silent banished from the orchestra. The lover was missing.
This hurt her heart like a persistent rash but it was the oven left on that burnt the house down. The lover was obsessed with cooking sourdough.
Despite what the papers said, she still believed it to be the loveliest love she would ever know and now that love was trapped in a whisky bottle. So she keeps all the bottles she finishes, which is not too many and not a few. She tips the empty vessels up carefully over the sink and waits to see if the lover has left a clue to where they might have gone. The farmers won’t let her check their fields, so instead she looks in likelier places. So far, the only things that have tumbled out are store credits and the occasional drip of whiskey, thick from lazily mooching on the bottom of the bottle. No one can live without a steady stream of nostalgia and her needs were no different than anybody else’s.
She decided to walk to the shops. Choosing to leave without her shoes, as they made her inappropriately tall and she wanted to loom over no one. Her shadow already stretched long and ghastly at high sun and with shoes it made threats to overthrow the government. Her socks had holes at both ends, so she had to walk slowly.
Careful. Careful.
The grass thickening along the path as she edged along. Connecting themselves beneath the soil, wrapping root limbs and dancing a quiet but suggestive tango.
Careful. Careful.
Careful not to disrupt the beat of the worlds drum or melt more ice in the arctic. The polar bears can only swim so far before they tire and drown. Her toes were always trying to get ahead, whilst her heels humiliatingly despondent.
She either walked for days or years, it really didn’t matter because when she got there, the supermarket shelves were empty. A lost child was in aisle three crying, or perhaps it was a man, it was hard to tell, but either way she wished they would stop. The sobbing was making her bones ache and her thoughts jumble like all the traffic lights had turned green at once and the cars were starting to crash into each other blindly.
A trail of slippery milk, pale, the colour of de ja vu spread itself across the floor, a little river. Where was all the soup? Where was all the toilet paper and the small hearts plucked and shoved into jars? Where was the rice and where were the animals? They were not grazing, and they were not in the fridge packaged for convenience. So where were they?
Doris looked up. They were not in the rafters.
She went to aisle three to ask the lost child about the missing animals, or perhaps it was a man, it was hard to tell. He looked up, a milk moustache glistening on his top lip, his bottom lip trembling. He locked eyes with Doris but pretended not to understand her questions. He was the type of child to cling to his mothers leg and the type of man to suckle he wife’s breast. She could see that now.
Grass was starting to grow on the child, or perhaps it was a man, the very middle of their knees and the bottoms of their feet. They were doing the opposite of disappearing. They were taking up more space. Doris didn’t know how she felt about this.
“You are not my child.” She said.
“I am not your man.” Said the small child, or perhaps it was a man. Doris turned to look back at the child. “What did you say?”
“Whhhaaaaa” said the man.
She left the abandoned man, or perhaps it really was just a damp child and walked around the very edge of the room. The first rule of supermarkets is that you should always shop from the edges and work your way in. Doris doesn’t know who she learned this from, she just knew it to be true.
Slowly. Slowly.
Slowly, because the very edge of things is always sharp. The edge of grief is the sharpest place in the world. No soft caresses or sliver linings, only advertisements for things that didn’t exist and a dog in the distance barking.
Doris pretended to fill a trolley, grasping air in her fingers as she reached into the empty shelves. The left wheel was permanently on lock and emitted a horrible squeal. She pushed harder. The trolley couldn’t see her through a lack of eyes, so it screamed its story instead and turned in large circles. Doris reaching for the same invisible produce over and over again.
Travelling in circles is exhausting for anyone. Doris could have had one hundred good nights’ sleep and still felt tired. A race with a tantruming trolley was always going to end back at the start.
Doris wanted to sleep. She wanted to sleep like a baby. She wanted to sleep like a hundred year-old man in a recliner.
She sits on the starting line and opens a bottle of Cutting Sark that isn’t there. The bottle spills out of date Christmas carols and leaves a stain on her trousers.
She wonders where all the people are. Are they at home? Are they hiding in the walls behind the insulation? Buried in the carpark, run over by their own cars? Maybe looking at their aging hands, they’ve put themselves out to pasture. All the people now in paddocks on hands and knees eating the grass and huddling under the one tree in the shade.
Doris looked on the supermarket shelf where the trees used to be. There were no trees, but there was a little red sign made from paper that said
Out
Of
Stock.
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