"Groceries"

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I’ve been trying to keep to the outer perimeter of the grocery store. Health 

websites say it’s the best way to avoid processed goods. Most of the good 

stuff, milk and fresh produce, are along the border. Like a moat, or a bar-

ricade. Isn’t that funny, all the good protecting the unsavory. Feels like a 

metaphor. To be honest, I stick to the outside because there’s more space. 

There’s less construction moving around a table filled with peaches than, 

say, the cracker aisle. There is a sense of drowning among those center 

lanes. When I see a buggy at the end of one, I think of cage doors. En-

trapment. The end of things. Which also makes me think of Jonah, you 

know, the guy from the whale, or, rather, the guy in the whale. I played him 

in a church production once. They asked me to do it because they could 

tell my faith was starting to teeter, cowering from the church bus when it 

pulled in the driveway, begging my mother to shoo it on from the window. 

They came back Monday morning and offered me the lead. Jonah ends 

up in side the fish as a test of his faith, or something. That’s how I felt, up 

on stage, in the center of a papier mâché whale, newspaper articles about 

high school softball bleeding through the blue paint. The whale was wait-

ing for my re-devotion. In the grocery store, fish can be found on the outer 

barrier, usually in the back. Salmon, tuna, maybe haddock, depending on 

region and time of year. Sometimes there’s one of those lobster aquariums. 

When I was a kid, I thought the aquarium was a magnifying glass, and the 

lobsters were actually much smaller than they looked. Little palm-resting 

crustaceans. Practically crawdads. I’ll never know where I got the idea. 

Maybe I wanted them to be tiny enough to escape without notice. Maybe, 

to me at least, being trapped in something massive made you small by 

default.