I peer up and down the cereal aisle at Piggly Wiggly to make sure I’m alone. Then I lift down the oblong box of Corn Flakes and tuck its noisy contents deep inside the pocket of my late husband’s trench coat. Dumb word “late.” My old man used this trench coat for our fifty years of married life before he couldn’t eat steak or ribs no more, never mind this here cereal. Some idiot probably wonders ‘who steals cereal?’ Someone down and out like me. That’s who. Special K. Rice Krispies. Cheerios. Wheaties. Milk turns it into a soggy soup easy on my dentures.
I steer my empty cart toward the dairy aisle when my bum knee knocks the damn box. I tell it “just you shush” as a pissy-looking dude in a Cowboys’ jacket wheels his cart around the corner. He squints and says, “Are you talking to me?” I figure his sorry day needs a surprise. I swing open my old man’s coat and flash my Corn Flakes at him.
His cart comes to a full stop. He peers around as if to say, “Do you see what I see?” Then I note the pocket of his Cowboys’ jacket has a suspicious sagging lump. Aha.
He catches me eyeing it, so he flashes his jacket full on. Clearly a fat chicken is roosting in his right inside pocket. His beard can’t hide his grin. I huff, “damn chickens weigh too much for me.” He thinks on this, then he says, “What do you want? I got another pocket. Meat department maybe.”
I nod, swing my cart around and head for meat. Red meat. I hear his cart following me. Oh glory. It’s been years since a brisket bubbled in my old oven. Slathered in sliced onions. I choose a big, fat slab and slide it forward. We exchange nods, then I wheel away to produce to find four onions. When he catches up to me near check-out, both his pockets are sagging now. We checkout in different lanes as if we don’t know each other. I pay for one onion and keep the other three quiet in my second pocket. He buys a quart of chicken broth.
We meet outside near his battered motorcycle. He transfers his chicken to a tattered saddle pouch and pulls out a Piggly Wiggly bag to make the brisket easy for me to carry home. I give him an onion. “Well,” he says. “Well,” I say. We aren’t partners. We aren’t anything. But we both find it hard to say goodbye.
~
Pamela Painter is the award-winning author of five story collections. Her stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Flash Boulevard, Harper’s, JMWW, Smokelong Quarterly, Three Penny Review, and Vestal Review among others, and in the anthologies Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, and recently in Flash Fiction America, Best Microfiction of 2023, and Best Small Fictions 2023. Painter’s stories have received three Pushcart Prizes and have been staged by Word Theatre in LA, London and NYC. Her story “Doors” has just been made into a short film.