Weather Machine
Someone propped the front doors to the grocery store open with bags of driveway salt. Dusk’s bleeding light stopped just short of them. Shoppers piled up their umbrellas and windbreakers behind a barricade of “CAUTION: WET FLOOR” signs, where the greeter usually stood. A weather report was etched into a plywood sign, hanging from the rafters above the tools of forfeited warfare against the downpour. Rain fell in sheets above the aisles, as it always did, inducing a fumigating fog. When I first walked past the sopping umbrellas, the music hit my ears and made my heartbeat stall. The ceiling was high enough for the searchlights of debt collectors to perch above the low-pressure system, demanding certain patrons beckon to their highest imperative. I kept a slow pace. My stomach rumbled at the sight of food. Other customers shuffled between aisles like cassette dancers of old—playing out some revered, concrete choreography that left its cast to shrivel up in spirit and default to speaking in the past tense. The soundtrack to their routines emanated from the invisible intercom, tape warbles and all. The mist stung my oily face and peeled solidified stains off my wet shoulders. Gusts headed for the front door dried my eyes on their way out and led me by the hand through the currents of the inverted ocean crammed in the franchise’s walls. Stocked shelves and tile floors shined with a watery film instead of icy fluorescence. A glazed posture kept everyone declining forward and toward their destinations. As I began searching out mine, layers of flour and greywater were freed from my shoes. In the toy aisle I saw a carnival playset packaged in cardboard and thought about how spectators in the Colosseum were socialized around gore. Seeing primal blows that made their neighbors and traitors unfurl—they must have found solace in lacerated reminders that we all carry the same insides. I shook the condensation off the package and continued walking on—carrying the memory of innocence stowed in this childhood memento. It was almost identical to the one I used to play with decades ago.
When I entered those doors, what brought me in feels like it gets buried. When I’m outside of the store, I can’t recall why being here makes me plug my nose at the cruelty hanging in the air.
Nobody stayed in one place for more than a moment. If they did, the water would start climbing up their legs. A few aisles over, a vulturous spotlight triangulated a shopper by combing above the maze—a walking target that slowly dried off the longer the hot glow fixated on them. I expected the intercom to say their name or hooded resource officers to make them disappear from aisle 17 to pay the men in the hazy rooms downstairs. They turned the corner ahead—walking through the soiled greeting card aisle—past me in a blinding moment with their head down. My shivering paused under the outskirts of that parasitic hue. Of all the nooks and corners here, I couldn’t find anything that showed how to grow what stocked the shelves.
The malaise grew heavier near the center of the building where rows of double-decker buses sat motionless on bricks. I wondered how they got into the store, their tires were nowhere to be seen. Signage that read “CHECKOUT COUNTERS ON SECOND LEVEL” lay next to the closest bus, tipped over next to a bushel of waterlogged bananas. I entered. Some piercing whirr was found on the first level. Its source was hidden by several black curtains and sounded as though someone was cutting tile with a wet saw that had dried out. The line ahead of me snaked up the stairs and ran toward the back of the bus. All the customers stood where the seats ought to be. At the end of the line, a lady with a company vest ran the checkout counter, where she sent the groceries people brought down the conveyor belt, back toward the entrance. Rain pattering on the bus’s steel roof resonated with the static in my ears; shopper’s whispers hydroplaned between my thoughts. The shirt under her vest was sun-bleached and fraying at the shoulders, and I wondered how much precipitation had seeped into its stitches. Behind her a single window faced the pile of umbrellas, and the weather report’s backside.
“It can’t be morning again, can it?” I asked. Nobody bothered to answer.
The customers and I watched fresh fruits waltz down the conveyor belt occupying what once was the bus’s center aisle. The woman grabbed the fruit everyone gathered out of their carts, two at a time, and gently placed them on the conveyor. At an infant’s crawl, the vanilla beans and raw calamari prepared to leap into the dumpster beside me at the end of the conveyor. I nudged a few people out of the way to watch the delicacies fall into the bin; not even leaky packages of veal made a thud when vanishing within its brim. Taking a moment to dry off, I shook my head like a wet house pet, because my hands were full. Patrons ahead of me in line informed me that I smelled like one too.
Maybe the Coliseum spectators hated the maulings. They could have just wanted a place to go, something to watch, someone to cheer for.
Between nearby murmurs, the salivating eyes that packed the bus glanced at the fruit on the conveyor, then back at their baskets. None of us considered saving any of the fruit as they formed a stream, marching toward premature rot. My stomach growled again. Or maybe that was the short man next to me who kept scratching his face. A woman in a slightly different shade of blue hospital scrubs walked down the exit corridor with a full basket. We all took a tiny step forward. Unbleached paper and plastic flamingos and honeysuckle blossoms soaked from the sleet replaced the falling fruits. I couldn’t get my mind off where the branches of those banana trees once swayed. A billion-year-old lineage of flesh and peace, collapsing within arm’s reach.
The solutions I looked for eluded me. There was nothing else I could do besides question.
“I’ve been a dishwasher since I was seventeen, why are we doing this? Why grow food nobody eats?” I said, gesturing to the abyssal heart as it continued beating. Those who heard me over the rainfall on the roof stopped their conversations and began to snicker. One of them pointed at the single item I brought to checkout: the three-ring-circus toy set. The employee had nothing to say.
“How dull can you be to only buy one thing at the grocery store?” an older man said. The masquerade of satisfaction stayed taut to their pale cheeks.
The echo of their judgement drowned out the rain. Whispers now surrounding me felt hungry and rabid. I attempted to hop over the conveyor belts’ dumpster toward a dimly lit way out, but my drenched shoes slipped off the counter and I tumbled into the Ouroboric inaction oozing from inside the trash can.
Andy is a fifth-year student of urban forestry, sustainability, and creative writing at Michigan State University. This past April, he was selected as a finalist for the Annie Balocating Undergraduate Prize for Poetry by the M.S.U. Residential College of the Arts and Humanities’ Center for Poetry. He has been previously published in issues of magazines from SMPLE’s Paper and Knife Fight Booking Co’s The PLUG, but Weather Machine is his first piece of published fiction!
When they’re not studying or working as a prep cook, Andy is either enjoying nature or playing bass guitar in the local band Bicycle Thief. They’re a big fan of fungi and dogs of (nearly) all shapes and sizes. Andy gets his writing inspiration from the dollar bin of his local record store, along with infinite conversations of call-and-response found in blues and bluegrass music.