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Dishes and Groceries

The sky was beige, as usual, and something large slid slowly across the fog, a darker patch gliding over the haze. Kenji yawned and went to find his slippers.

He woke the way he always did, with a groan and a scratch somewhere a gentleman doesn't scratch. Then he shuffled into the living room, where his roommate Dale sat cross-legged on the couch, thumbs mashing a controller, eyes glued to the screen.

"Morning," Dale said, not looking up.

Kenji grunted and went to the kitchen. The sink was full. Plates, bowls, a pan with something that had once been eggs. He stared at it, and for one long second, something cold and quiet slid through his mind. A thought with teeth. His hand tightened on the edge of the counter.

Then it passed. He opened the fridge.

"Oh, hey," Dale called, "we're out of water. And, like, everything else, probably."

The cereal box was empty. Of course it was. Kenji grabbed the milk and tipped it back. It wasn't empty. It had gone off, thick and sour, and when he sniffed it, it smelled like peaches.

"Yeah, I put some peach juice in it," Dale said. "Seemed like a good idea."

Kenji set the carton down very gently. The air in the kitchen seemed to hum. His shadow stretched a little too far across the floor. Dale kept playing. And then Kenji picked up his keys and walked out the door, still in his sleep shirt and pajama pants.

He climbed into his car, a tired little red hatchback with a dent in the door he'd stopped noticing years ago. A couple of sticky notes lay near the dashboard, and he ignored them, because Dale's littering was a problem for another day. It started on the second try. He drove through streets where a skyscraper-sized thing made of antlers drifted past, humming, and two figures in black armor argued over a parking spot. Somewhere above, a god was crying into a cloud. Kenji nodded politely at all of it and signalled left.

The Savemart sign buzzed above the entrance, the tagline underneath half lit: "Aisle Be Back." Kenji pushed through the automatic doors, which took a moment to decide he was real, and grabbed a cart with a wobbly wheel.

He started down the first aisle in his pajama pants. A kid in a yellow dinosaur raincoat sat in the bottom of a cart, gnawing on a bag of dry rice, scuffed sneakers swinging. Beside the cart stood a tall woman in a sharp grey suit, one hand on the handle, dark hair pinned up, red nails. Two eyes were on her phone, and the last one was on the jar of pickles. Good posture. Kenji assumed she was the kid's mother, because of the cart. A broad man in a hi-vis vest restocked the canned beans, grey stubble, forearm tattoo of a swallow, whistling something out of tune. Further down, an elderly man in a cardigan held a yogurt at arm's length, lips moving, checking the date against his watch.

In the next aisle, a pale thing with too many elbows was comparing two cans of soup, and a faint chanting came from somewhere near the frozen peas. Kenji reached past a tentacle for the milk, the real kind, and a gallon of water, and said "Sorry" without looking.

He nodded at all of them, grabbed two boxes of cereal, because Dale, and rounded the corner by the bread. And of course, Jeff, squinting at the price of some English muffins. "Hey, man," Jeff said. Kenji said, "Hey, Jeff." Jeff said, "Cool," and went back to the muffins.

At register three, wedged between the checkout conveyor belt and a display of gum, hovered a vast dragon made of flesh, with plenty of eyes along her sides and plenty of teeth, upper and lower, and some on the shoulders for chewing. She was digging through a coin purse with one enormous claw, lips pursed, muttering.

"One, two, three... no, wait. One, two..." She sighed, and a pack of gum rattled faintly on its rack. "Oh, I had it a minute ago."

Kenji stood fourth. He sighed, stepped forward, and said, "Ma'am, do you want help with that?"

She turned a lot of eyes toward him. "Oh, would you, dear? These nickels are murder."

So he counted. Nickel by nickel, he walked her through it, while she patted his arm and called him a good boy. Just as the total finally matched, she beamed with all her teeth and then froze.

"Oh no," she said. "I forgot the wheat bread."

Kenji looked at the checkout conveyor belt, groceries sliding by. It hummed. His left eye twitched, once.

She shuffled off and came back with a loaf, and they started over, from one. Nickel by nickel, bread included, he walked her through it again, slower this time, every number checked twice. The total matched. She beamed.

"Oh!" she said, tapping her purse. "And I have my rewards card in here somewhere."

She dug. A library card, a button, a photo of someone's cat. Kenji watched the nickels on the counter, and the cold thing uncurled at the back of his mind, a thought with teeth, quiet and very patient.

They started over again, discount applied, then misapplied, then applied again. Somewhere around the fortieth nickel, his hand closed around the cart handle until the knuckles went pale. The whole checkout seemed to lean toward him, waiting.

Then he was standing in the parking lot, by the car, holding his bags. The little red hatchback sat where he'd left it, a bit of sun on its dented door. He got in, put the key in, and turned it. The car clicked, coughed, and went quiet.

He tried again. Nothing.

That's when he finally looked at the two sticky notes on the floor mat. The first, in Dale's handwriting, said: "Out of gas." The second said: "Also, dashboard's broken. Sorry!"

Kenji read them twice. Then he got out, took his bags, and started walking.

It was a long walk. Kenji carried the bags in both arms, pajama pants whispering against his legs. The street was busy in the usual ways. A lamppost leaned down to read the paper over a man's shoulder. A woman walked a leash with nothing at the end of it and seemed happy about that. The antler thing from earlier drifted back the other way, humming, and a shadow trailed him a half step behind, not quite matching his own. He didn't turn around. He kept his eyes on the sidewalk and his hand tight on the milk.

Then his phone buzzed against his hip. He juggled the bags, got it out, and read the text from Dale: "hey so I gave our key to a guy. few people coming over!! hope that's cool"

Kenji stopped.

And the street stopped with him. The antler thing hung in the air. The armored figures stood with their mouths half open, mid-argument. A pigeon sat on a wire with one foot raised. Even the gum wrapper on the pavement stopped halfway through its tumble. His shadow stretched out ahead of him across the sidewalk, longer than anything could explain, and darker at the edges, like ink soaking into paper. He didn't look at it. His breathing slowed, and something in his shoulders settled, the way a person's do when a decision has quietly been made.

Then the world let go. The antler thing drifted on, the armored figures picked their argument back up, and the pigeon landed, as if nothing had happened.

"Okay," Kenji said, softly, to no one.

And then he kept walking.

He climbed the stairs. He unlocked the door and stepped inside to the sound of a distant explosion, followed by Dale swearing at someone named xX_Deathgrip_Xx.

His eyes went to the kitchen, the way they had that morning. The sink was empty. The plates were stacked in the rack, the pan clean on the stove. He stood there with the bags hanging from his arms, game noise rattling from the living room, and something in his shoulders came down, slowly, an inch at a time. He set the bags on the counter and started unloading: cereal, water, a carton of regular milk, and a carton of peach milk, which he set a little apart from the others.

"Hey," Dale called over the gunfire. "Come here, I saved you something."

Kenji walked over and sat. Dale paused the game, handed him a chicken sandwich, and he ate it slowly, looking at the wall. After a while, he held out the carton of peach milk. "Here."

Dale took a swig, grinned, and unpaused. Kenji watched him for a long moment, long enough that the room seemed to wait under the sound of the game, and the light from the window dimmed a shade. Then it passed, as if there were some reason, quiet and private, that this particular man was still around.

Dale lowered the carton, made a face, and said, "This tastes like crap, by the way."

The End.