The Supermarket of Cthulhu

Hunting all over town yesterday for a poinsettia (Chiara needed it for a table display) and ended up back in my neighborhood, checking the grocery stores.

Basically there are two. There is the Smith's, which is really rather nice; smallish and yuppified, and with a liquor store and a dry cleaner's underneath. And there is the Albertson's, which gives off so palpable an aura of dread for me that I've never even gone inside.

But Chiara needed a poinsettia. And Smith's did not have one to sell.

So I'm in the parking lot of the Albertson's and it is nearly deserted.

In a handicapped spot is a junker with a toddler-sized severed doll head hanging from the rear view mirror. There are two spots very near the entrance specifically marked only for police parking. Off in the far corner of the lot, under a sputtering halogen light, is a windowless van in idle.

Inside is a circus show.

The aisles are strewn with bags of food toppled from their shelves, puddles of snowmelt have to be jumped at nearly every checkout stand, the bakery is dark but its wares are still out, under their sneeze guards, going stale.

The clientele give the impression that the store's manager may have accidentally booked a roadie convention for the store and, on the same day, a 1973 class reunion for an all transsexual high school.

A scarecrow man with stringy, wet hair sang to himself as he passed by me on his way to the exit. In his shopping bag he had lightbulbs and a box of matches.

As I searched frantically for the floral department, a married couple dressed in leather argued forcefully over a package of waffle cones.

A solitary old woman slowly pushed a cart so squeeky one might have been forgiven for thinking it was haunted by the ghost of a child who died in pain. The old woman seemed not to hear it, but shuffled on, looking lost and afraid.

The florist's counter was like something out of the Omega Man, not sinister or rundown per se, but so completely abandoned and stocked so entirely with dead and dying plants as to give the impression that the florist had left weeks ago to hunt for fuel or firewood and had never returned.

I quickly selected the least plague ridden poinsettia from the dismal pile and made for the checkstands.

I took one look at the snaggle-toothed man working the express lane and the corpulent zombie packing the bags of groceries and made for the self-checkout.

In the end, I made it home without incident. Chiara came home some three hours later and I was still washing and washing my hands.

She didn't even use the plant in her table display. She said there was just something wrong about it.

I called her a snob.