The Back (Part 2)

Fred then started clicking his tongue and shaking his head at her patronizingly.

“I’m afraid you leave me with no choice,” he said, quickly jotting something down on his clipboard. “You are to report to the Slow Line on your shopping days until further notice.”

He then gave her a petulant little smile and added: “Now be a good little customer and get back to shopping.”

“That’s it!” Martha screamed. She wasn’t sure what kind of wacky game this minimum wage worker was playing, but it was going to end that very instant. She pushed her shopping cart off her, and it rolled into a display of canned beef. About a dozen or so fell off and got dented.

Martha then adopted her power stance—which involved spreading her legs, puffing out her chest, and cracking her knuckles—before she incanted her magic spell.

“I’m going to need to speak with your manager," she said.

Fred squinted his eyes and gave her a kind of bemused smirk.

“What on earth for?”

Martha then stormed up to Fred and pointed her neon-green painted fingernail threateningly just inches from his nose.

“That is between me and your manager!”

Fred snorted.

“Alright, if you wish,” he said, having trouble containing laughter. “One manager coming up.”

He then rubbed his thumb against his fingers and called out: “Walt! Come out, come out wherever you are! Coooey!”

Soon enough the sound of little feet could be heard trotting along the linoleum floor. Then, peeking out from behind a display of flour tortillas were the green and yellow iridescent eyes of a tabby cat.

“Walt, there you are, this lady would like to…”

The cat quickly ducked back behind the shells, and the sound of little footsteps could be heard trotting away.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a rat came scuttling by the floor right past Martha. She jumped back and shrieked.

“Oh, there’s Cedric, our district manager. You could have a word with him if you like,” Fred said. But before he could even finish that sentence, the rat was out of sight. “Well you missed your chance...”

Martha, taking a moment to recover from her reeling, said: “Alright, this is very clever and everything, but I am outta here. You can kiss a sweet farewell to my business from now on. You hear me, little man? You just lost your store a lifetime customer.”

Fred grinned as he crossed his arms together.

“Oh have I,” he said.

“You bet your bottom dollar!” she exclaimed. “And not only that, I’ll tell my friends not to shop here. Your little supermarket will be out of business faster than you can say Chapter 7.”

At that, Fred let out such a boisterous laugh that lasted longer than it had any right to. When he finally regained enough of his composure that he could eek out a coherent sentence between guffaws, he said: “How exactly are you going to do that?” 

Martha kneaded her eyebrows together at this odd question and retorted: “I’m going to tell them.”

She then grimaced and glanced sheepishly down at her feet, disappointed at how lame that comeback seemed.

“Oh will you!” Fred said, continuing the argument.

“Oh yes, Buddy, don’t you worry about it,” Martha said. “You and every other employee in this store will soon be in the unemployment line.”

“Hah!” he said. “You think so?”

“I know so,” Martha continued. “And furthermore, I am going to write to Corporate.”

“Corporate?” Fred said, then looking genuinely dumbfounded. To Fred, Corporate was a wheat field located somewhere in the middle of Kansas.

Martha took a deep breath and raised her eyebrows. Regaining a bit of her composure, she said: “But seeing as I need these groceries, you will enjoy my business one final time. I am not going to deal with the check out line, however. I will pay you here and be done.”

She reached into her handbag, grabbed three hundred-dollar bills from her wallet and fanned them out to Fred.

“This should be more than enough to cover it,” she continued.

When she saw that Fred wasn’t grabbing them but instead watching her like he was being fabulously entertained, she let them go and let the bills waft onto the linoleum floor.

“You can keep the change for yourself,” she said. “Or if you don't know what to do with that kind of cash, then you can give it to that cat.”

She twisted her lips and gave him one final narrow-eyed glare before she proceeded to push her shopping cart to the front of the supermarket.

As she did so, Fred was laughing so loud and so prologned that she could hear him all the way on her journey to the front of the store—passed bags of potato chips, bottles of green tea, cans of green beans, and campfire marshmallows, among other things.

When she found herself facing the automatic, tinted glass sliding door that opened up to the outside, she pushed her cart up to it. However, it did not open. Figuring it must have been a malfunction of the sensor, she waved her arms around in hopes of setting it off. But it still would not budge.

She then looked behind her and noticed—to her horror—that there were a half dozen pink-polo-shirt and teal-sun-visor clad employees surrounding her and slowly closing in. They all had menacing looks on their faces and were hunched over for with their fingers stiff and curled out like claws.

Martha gasped and then abandoned her shopping cart. She ran to the sliding door and tried to pry it open with her fingers.

It suddenly it opened, and blinding rays of light came bursting in. Martha cowered, shielding her eyes until she was able to make out a figure standing at the door. 

It was a police officer. He was garbed in a blue uniform, reflective sunglasses, and had a polished silver badge on his chest that read “Oscaloo Police Department — Officer Chris McKay.”

Martha smiled gratefully as she put her neon-green painted fingertips to her chest.

“Oh officer, thank goodness you’re here,” she said, breathing happily. “You’ll never guess what this supermarket put me through…”

Officer McKay then tipped down his sunglasses so that he could look Martha straight in the eyes.

“Ma’am put your hands up where I can see them.”

Martha, then knitting her eyebrows together and letting her pink-painted lips rest in a horrified position replied: “What?”

“Don’t make me say it twice,” the officer continued.

She then held up her palms sheepishly at the police officer to either side of her head.

“Higher!” the officer barked.

Martha complied with trembling arms. She was cowering so much, then, that it looked like she would collapse onto her knees at any moment.

Officer McKay brought his left hand to his side and hovered it over a taser gun that was attached to his belt. 

“Now what’s this I hear about you refusing to buy rutabagas?” he said.

 

~*~

 

Something was very wrong.

Martha ran like a quarterback dodging and ducking through pink-shirted grocery store employees. She zoomed past displays of vegetables, soda pop, and boxes of cereal, among other things. Officer McKay chased her pointing that taser gun at her, which was cracking like a bug zapper massacring mosquitos.

“Stop!” he yelled. “By order of The Shop-Mart of Oscaloo family of grocery stores!”

Martha had never been on the wrong side of the law before. Even when she was caught drunk driving her red Porsche into a drainage ditch last year, she managed to convince the sergeant assigned to the case to blame it on the ditch. Although he was stumped at exactly how he was supposed to issue a citation to a hole in the ground.

Martha wasn’t sure how or why any of this happened, but she knew when it started. When she went through the doors The Back the world got all wacky. Maybe if she could go back through those doors, the world would return to normal.

She ran up an aisle of cake mixes, confectionary sugar, and birthday candles, among other things, and then darted past a frozen bin of pint-sized containers of sherbet. She stopped when she found herself standing, once again, before those black double doors that read “Employees Only.”

Martha saw that grocery store employees—which had grown in numbers to include a small crowd of cashiers, butchers, assistant managers, lotto ticket hawkers, and others—were quickly closing in on either side of her. Behind her, she could hear the rapid zapping of Officer McKay’s taser gun quickly getting louder. Funny, the rhythm of the zapping seemed to match the beat of the bossa nova music playing above her.

“Freeze!” the officer yelled, as he pulled the trigger of his taser gun. The sparking electrodes that zipped off it were headed for a direct hit between Martha’s shoulder blades.

However, he missed.

Because like a stunt performer out of a Jean-Claude Van Damme film, Martha leapt face first through those black double doors.

However, instead of landing in the replica of the grocery store that she had just gone into, she found herself in a warehouse that was almost entirely empty apart from a small shelf of Blueberry Bites to her left. 

There was one box of the product laying on the floor that had a hole chewed through it. The rat that Martha had seen scuttling by the floor earlier had a cookie crumb in its paws and was rapidly nibbling away at it. It paused stopped briefly to observe Martha, but that didn’t last long—the cookie was so delicious that it went right back to nibbling.

To Martha’s right she saw that tabby cat—the manager—belly-up, rubbing its back on a bit of carpet that had happened to be there. Then, she saw that the entire back wall of the room was a movie screen, depicting shocks of wheat waving freely in the wind.

She quickly got back to her feet and madly grabbed a box of Blueberry Bites and held it closely to her chest. Scores of pink-shirted employees with rage in their eyes filed in and were surrounding her. 

But the rage in Martha’s eyes was even greater. She screamed so loudly that it sprained her voice box: “I knew you were keeping Blueberry Bites back here!” As she breathed maniacally through her mouth with her lower jaw extended, she grabbed a couple more boxes off the shelf and also held those closely to her chest.

Officer McKay gradually emerged through the growing crowd of pink-shirted employees with his ticking taser gun reloaded and ready to fire.

“Drop the Berry Bites, and no one gets hurt!” he yelled at her.

Martha scrunched her nose and replied back hoarsely: “From my cold, dead fingers!”

Officer McKay then fired the taser gun, and the barbed electrodes cleaved right into her neck. She fell face first onto the floor and quickly faded out of consciousness.

 

~*~

 

The next thing Martha knew, she was watching a bagger—a young woman with red, curly hair and braces—put a rutabaga into a paper bag and then load it to her shopping cart. Martha’s knees were aching so badly that it felt like she had been standing for hours. And indeed, that even appeared to be the case, as it was pitch black outside. She looked behind her, and that area that she'd seen earlier as The Slow Line was empty. The red dot matrix sign on the wall read "Current Slow Line Wait Time: 0 hrs. 1 min."

“Rutabaga,” the bagger said to Martha, grinning. “That’s a fine choice.”

“Uhhh,” Martha replied, weakly.

The lights of the supermarket flickered off as soon as Martha labored her shopping cart through the automatic doors, which had opened for her that time. She barely even had the strength to push her cart through the parking lot, which was entirely empty, apart from her red Porsche that was parked directly beneath a light. Her ears, then, were inundated with the sound of frogs and crickets out of nearby storm ditches.

Martha looked upon her Porsche as though it was an oasis in the desert. As she inched closer and closer to that beloved automobile, it made her happier and happier. She just couldn’t wait to go inside of and sit down. But first, of course, she had to unload her groceries into the trunk.

She fumbled in her handbag for a while to find her keys. When she located them, she pressed the unlock button on her fob and heard the locks click. She breathed a sigh of relief. 

However, when she reached for the trunk of the car, the doors suddenly locked. She tugged on the handle a few times, but it wouldn’t budge.

“What is going on?” she mumbled tiredly.

She pressed the unlock button on her fob once again, and the locks clicked open. 

But when she reached for the handle of the trunk, it locked again.

“Huh?” she said, examining her keys now, looking for any sign that there might have been something wrong with them. 

Then all of a sudden, her car started to talk to her.

“Get away from me, lady,” it said.

Martha squinted her mascara-caked eyes back at it and said: “Huh?”

“I said, get away from me,” it repeated.

She tiredly outstretched her arms, which allowed her heavy handbag to fall down her arms and hit the pavement with a thud.

“But you’re my car!” Martha said. 

“Not anymore,” it replied. “Besides which, I don’t want that big butt of yours stretching my Nappa leather seats.”

Promptly, its engine revved up and the headlights turned on. It then backed itself out of its parking space and drove off.

“Hey!” Martha yelled after it. “What do you expect me to do, roll this shopping cart home on foot?”

“I don’t think so, lady,” replied her shopping cart. It proceeded to roll itself back into the supermarket. 

Martha, feeling all strength give way in her legs, fell to her knees and wailed.

~*~
 

Picture from Wikimedia Commons.