Don't Ask

The Milk Element

I once knew a girl who ate cereal with a fork. She said it was to control the Milk Element and I didn’t question her because I’d seen the way she skewered her raisins.
Years later I bumped into her in a supermarket. The same girl, only now she was a woman.
Her hair was patchy in a way that told me not to ask and her trolley was full of calcium: full fat milk, farmhouse cheddar, Dairylea triangles. As I tapped her on the shoulder she was reaching for the cheese strings.
I connected the patchy hair with her early hatred of milk, and the stocking up of calcium products to mean her demise.
It all rushed through my head while I smiled at her, untruthfully, while we told each other small lies about satisfactory lives, not wanting to seem boring or unhappy, unfulfilled.
As I left the car park I saw her devouring the cheese strings.
The one quirk I remembered her by disintegrated through necessity or desire.
She was in a burgundy people carrier and there was nothing extraordinary about that.
I opened the boot and started unloading my trolley: cheese, apples, peas.
Where's the magic? I asked myself. Where's the adventure?
My old friend pulled out of her space with strands of cheese string dangling from her mouth, she kind of waggled it at me, her hands too busy with the steering wheel to wave. So I bit into an apple and waggled it back.
Perhaps this is all we’ve got. I thought, as she dropped the cheese string into her lap and laughed.