Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
Cat toys. They have an aisle for cat toys. Of all the gaudy alleys in all the supermarkets and I find myself boxed into the last seconds of existence surrounded by fake mice and pom-poms. I fucking hate cats.
I can hear Mrs Graves calling out for her dead husband Franklin as she has sex with Billy Pike over in Personal Hygiene. Mrs Graves was my PE teacher and Billy always did fancy his chances. He’d say that she had pools in her eyes when she looked at him and that he could feel her words when she spoke.
In Wine and Beer, the good Reverend Donner and his goodly wife Tamzen and their goodlier daughter Elitha, sit drunk and scared and eating bits of their Christ in a circle. Even with vomit and breadcrumbs stuck to her lips, I love this girl. I really, truly actually do.
I love her even though she thinks I’m a creep. She said nothing as I pushed through my shyness and proclaimed that the way her hair floats and filters the sun is the most beautiful thing that I’d ever, ever seen. Mind you, now saying it back, it does sound a bit Ted Bundy-ish.
In the meat section, Patrick Breen is crying as he kisses and pulls at the hair of Lewis Keesburg and neither one thinks about rugby as they squirm atop a vacuum sealed mattress of cheese-filled sausages and party-pack portions of pork.
So quickly it came to this, the end of all ends. Sparks, acid filled motes or maybe they are even alive – these blistering fireflies that swirl and stick to the glass. Oh, how they burn, how they dissolve and eat us away. Maybe they are metaphor, a construct, a delusion. One born of hate and ignorance and legislation signed by fat-fingered men. Things that made me think I was hated and ignored, yet I know it is not fictitious this thing that now contorts and thumps at the walls.
The ones who ran out back into the whip to look for those things they most loved, they are gone. They are dead.
I knew them all. And this last handful of life, the people who stayed and cowered here and found for themselves an appropriate aisle, I know them too. But I am sure they don’t know me.
Futility builds little clans. No time for bets that are hedged, no time for talk. There is barely but time to cast off these – our dogged blankets of lead.
I sit here alone squeezing a rubber toy, it is in the shape of a ball of wool and it squeals like the drawing of sick breath. The moan thump of the sex and the climaxing blurry pant of hymns surge and they beat in the blood of my ears. I know I have wasted my moment. Elitha, all I wanted was to talk.
I scream and all sound folds down into one sucked screech. A drone that is gulped down by the red fire blaze as the tiles on the floor rip like a zipper spitting its teeth and my world it breaks into two.
“Party-pack portions of pork”… I love a bit of alliteration! It was a bit of light relief in such a dark subject. It reminded me a little of the start of SFW if you’ve ever seen it? Loved it Hari, really did.
That passage about the rugby players was actually inspired by true events… people who denied who they were because of social and familial expectation. As ever, really appreciate you comments.
Was it really? Then I like that bit all the more. That, the Donner references etc… there is so much depth to your writing, so much detail contained in so few words.
The end, made tawdry by inevitability and nightmarish by panic. Nicely done.
Thank you Jae. Your critique is always well taken and greedily lapped up. 🙂
great depiction of helplessness at the end
Thank you very much, I’m happy the end of my story triggered the intended emotion.
Yikes. I hope I’m not around for that tomorrow when it comes … I mean, if it comes. Well done. Love the title, too.
Thank you David. I got the prompt for this story from a fake meme that was circulating. The Saddest Aisle in the Supermarket… and the sign read: Cat food/Cat toys/Wine and Meals for One. Nothing wrong with that, save for the damn cats 😉
Excelent. I had to search but all the character names here are drawn from the Donner party, right?
Well spotted, yes I did appropriate and chop and change a few names drawn from the ill-fated Donner party. Doomed and huddled together as the world closes in. Interestingly, I believe that Elitha (14 at the time) was one of the survivors and lived on into her nineties
“This is the way the world ends,
not with a bang, but a whimper.”
Nicely done. I’d like to think I’d approach that situation with a touch more dignity, not that it’d matter in the great scheme of things, just to myself; even if it were merely waving a walking stick and shouting, “gerrof ma lawn …” 🙂
“Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion; …” Thanks Simon, I can just imagine you yelling at the four horsemen to get their filthy hacks off of your front lawn 😉 😉
Well, to paraphrase Mr Pratchett, I’d at least offer Famine a packet of peanuts first .. 😉
Nothing like a end of days tale to spice up my day. 🙂 🙂 🙂
I too get strangely upbeat after a good heady dose of the apocalyptic 🙂
Carpe Diem. I love how you infuse ambuguity into your prose… Is this the end of the world or is this a breakdown in the mind of the narrator.
Thank you Emma. I just thought of this character standing in a crowded supermarket and feeling that everyone had someone, or something apart from her. Loneliness.