1

The room was dark.  The walls.  The furniture.  The blinds were shut.  Outside, in the midst of a thin drizzle, stood a lit streetlight.  Inside, nude, wrapped in black silk sheets, Mandy attempted sleep. 

One lamp in a corner gave off a pale white light.  By it sat Rollie squinting at The Portable Nietzsche.  Next door the phone was ringing.  No one picked it up.

The room was dark, but not silent.  Mandy's stereo shook, music oozing all through the walls. 

"I always sleep with music playing." Rollie remembered her words from their first night together.  The song she played now was from a few nights, last week, sometime ago when Mandy had been murmuring her love for it, for him, for something, maybe the way he was touching, caressing her, his tongue gliding down towards her navel and then he had been erasing something furiously, something he had just thought of and was quickly trying to scribble down, but the sound of her voice had interrupted his train of thought and he had ended up writing down gibberish.

Rollie hated the song.  He stood.  Beginning to pace, he began to read aloud.

"Whither is god," he mumbled, "I shall tell you.  We have killed him, you and I.  All of us are his murderers.  But how have we done this?  How were we able to drink up the sea?"

Violent thumping on the wall.  Next door a phone kept ringing that nobody could hear.  Mandy rolled over and banged her fist against the wall.  When the banging didn't stop, she reached over and turned up the music still louder.  Banging - now banging came persistently - banging came from next door and -

"Why don't you just shut up?!!"  Mandy's fist slammed the wall again.  Outside a strong rain began to fall. 

Rollie now sat downstairs.  Over the noise of the stereo, he could almost hear the rain hitting hard against the window pain.  Soundlessly moving his lips, he continued to read.  Mandy came barreling down, wearing a London Fog raincoat, probably nothing underneath.

"I'm going to the store.  Need anything?"  she asked completely unseriously.  She grabbed an umbrella and her purse.  

Rollie kept his eyes focused on the page.  "Yeah.  Wait," he said.  "I'm almost finished."  His eyes took in a few more sentences.  Mandy opened the door.  He held up a hand.  "Really, dear, wait, I'm almost done.  I'll go with you."  He said this in a mock robotic voice.

"I'll be in the car." She left, shutting the door and locking it.  Rollie removed his eyes from the page and put the book down on the floor, open, face-down.  He hurried to the closet, brought out a hooded jacket, unlocked the door and left, quickly relocking it behind him.  Upstairs, Mandy's stereo stayed on, shaking the walls.  It kept playing the same song. 

2

Mick's All-Nite Grocery stayed open until 11PM.  This night it was unusually crowded.  Mandy and Rollie stood in the dairy aisle while a kid, barely nine years old, whizzed by on Heelys.

"I can't find my wallet," Rollie said.  He searched his pockets. 

Mandy pushed the cart. "You lost it?  Did you bring it when you left home?"

"Yeah, I thought I did," Rollie said and wandered off down the aisle with the cheap toys.

"I'm paying again, huh?"  Mandy asked after him.  It was less of a question than a dart.

Rollie took a plastic squirt gun from the toys section, opened it and started filling it with grape juice he had picked up from the juice aisle. Meanwhile, Mandy put a carton of milk in the cart, threw it alongside a bottle of Diet Pepsi, Coke, Fresca, something and shuddered.  She could feel the goose bumps on her arms through the raincoat.  The cart rattled.

"You were going to anyway," Rollie said, when he had found her again. 

"What?" Mandy looked up.

"You were going to pay for the groceries anyway," he said.  The wheels of the cart were clacking. 

Mandy pushed past the snack foods aisle.  "No, I wasn't," she said and grabbed a bag of potato chips off a passing rack and let it crunch on top of the pizzas.

"We need bread too," Rollie said.     

"I'm aware of that," Mandy muttered. 

Rollie saw that ground beef was on sale as the meat counter loomed closer.  He thought he heard calliope music.  Mandy was about to turn the corner into the cereal aisle and wondered if any Lucky Charms lingered in the cupboard at home and -  CLANGGSSHH!!!!!! the sound of colliding grocery carts.

"Excuse me.  I'm sorry.  I guess I wasn't watching where I was going." It was a deep, thick, well-modulated, radio announcer voice, belonging to a man standing behind a cart that contained five dozen eggs.  All broken.  The eggs had been stacked neatly at the very front of the cart.  In the collision they had fallen and raw egg white was now dripping from the bottom of the man's cart onto the shining white grocery store floor.  The floor had just been mopped.  The man seemed to be a sales rep or manager or someone associated with the store.  It was hard to say.  He did not have a name badge.

"Oh yuck," Mandy said.  Fragments of egg shells laid scattered at her feet.  Rollie tore open a box of Kleenexes already in their cart and started wiping up the mess.

"Wait, really you don't have to do that," the man said.  "They pay people here for, uh, this type of thing." 

An older woman with a blue hat and another noisy cart steered clear of the accident and headed straight towards the ground beef sale.

"No, it's OK,"  Rollie persisted.  Mandy watched as he took a fistful of Kleenex, smeared the egg white a bit and handed the man the gooey used ones.

"Uh-," the man said, holding the Kleenex at a distance.  "I'll just set the damaged ones over here and that'll, uh... do for now."  He put the used Kleenex in one of the open egg cartons, then walked over to the meat display and set all the cartons of damaged eggs over several cellophane-wrapped packages of ground beef.

The woman with the blue hat turned around slightly and peered at the dripping egg cartons.  She glanced at the man.  He looked back and smiled, applying a wink.  "Hello," he said.  She took her on-sale ground beef and left, one of her cart's wheels refusing to roll with the rest, whine-squeaking off into the paper goods aisle.  The man walked back to where Rollie was still holding gooey, wet Kleenex.  Rollie's efforts had spread out the mess very well.

"If you need us to pay for the-"  The man held out his hand.

"Really, uh.. I'm sorry.  No. No.  That's all right.  It's unnecessary.  The store will, whatever, it's their problem." 

The boy with the Healys came around the corner, trying to stop as he saw the patch spilt egg whites on the floor.  He skidded slightly, the non-wheeled surface of his right shoe just managed to catch the slippery mess, sending him off balance, his hand outstretched to catch his fall.  He ended up with a fist full of egg shells and raw meat.

3

The grocery boy had a blue name tag that read FUZZENBON in small, white, capital letters.  He watched Rollie and Mandy roll into his check-out line, with an almost, but not quite, complete lack of anything resembling interest.  The phone rang.  He picked it up.

"Hello?"         

"Are the bread crumbs shreaded?" a voice asked.

"Um, I told you, you got the wrong number sir." Fuzzenbon hung up. 

A thin man with a shaved head and grey, well-trimmed moustache rolled his cart behind Rollie and Mandy.  In his cart there was a single artichoke and a device usually used to grab pickles out of a pickle jar.  Noticing Mandy, he pulled out a very small sketch pad and started penciling something she couldn't see.  He scratched his head, glanced around quickly and felt the pockets of his coat as if looking for something.      

"Well that was embarassing, huh?" Rollie asked. 

"Where?  What?"  Mandy said, stashing a pack of Wrigley's in her coat jacket as the cashier looked for the barcode on a box of tampons."

"Earth to Doris, that was Dr. Shelby babe."

"I don't know a Dr. Shelby babe."

"Ok, whatever."

Mandy was carefully putting a cluster of very long bananas on the conveyor.  "I didn't want to say anything," Mandy said, "because I didn't want him to recognize me."  She was grinding her teeth in just that way that your dentist warns you about.  She pulled the milk out of the cart and set it down on the conveyor with a thud.  "He and I had a very antagonistic relationship last semester, let me just put it that way."

"Yeah.  I know," Rollie said, lifting pizzas from the cart.  "I'm sure he recognized you, though."  He smirked.  "You got your ‘B+', though, didn't you?"

"B+... yeah, that was really great of him, considering I was failing."

"I'd have given you an A."

"Shut up."

Mandy took a Soap Opera Digest from the rack and dropped it on the pizzas that Rollie had just stacked on the conveyor.  She took a deep breath.

He laughed.  "Not even 'Grade A' tail.  That is just sad sweetie."

"Yeah, well, maybe if I had sent you over for a blow and go, that's would've solved it, fag boy."

Rollie eyed a pack of Dynamints and then sorted through the contents of the cart.  "Is there some reason we're buying Tylenol?" he asked.  "We have like a giant bottle of the generic stuff in the upstairs closet."

"Tylenol?"  Mandy asked.  "I thought we got the cheap stuff."          

"There's Tylenol here."  Rollie held up the bottle.  "And, we have the cheap stuff at home. Like 5 million caplets or something."         

"Well, go put this stuff back.  Hurry up," Mandy said.

Rollie disappeared down the soda aisle. 

Meanwhile, Fuzzenbon kept sliding down the groceries, the conveyor whirring whirring whirring. The old man behind Mandy kept looking intently at her, squinted, and held up a thumb, closing one eye.  He flipped his sketch pad and seemed to be making sketch markes on a clean white sheet. Mandy noticed this. 

"Excuse me.  What the hell do you think you're doing?" 

The man smiled.  "Pardon madam.  You see, I am an artiste, a painter."  He made a strange gesture that he apparently meant to seem magnanimous.  "When I see beauty, I am compelled to commit it to memory so that later I may paint.  You see, I would be delighted to paint you."

"Oh really?"  She took the sketch pad from his hand.

"Yes.  I am always on the look out for beauty and, of course, beautiful woman like yourself."

"Uh-huh."  The man did not seem to know English.  She looked at the page and where she thought she would see some crude lines forming what would probably be exaggerated female sex organs - tits and such - there was a photograph taped to the page.  It showed a woman, nude in a bathtub.  At first Mandy thought she saw the woman had a very large, odd smile on her face, but... she stared.  Closer and her eyes seemed to play a trick.  She looked at the photo again. She felt the Chinese food she had eaten earlier beginning an eventual journey up out of her throat.  She forced it back.  The woman in the picture, her throat had been slit, ear to ear."  Mandy felt her knees give a bit and she steadied herself.

"I would very much like to paint your body," the old man said, then turned his head from side to side.  "Then perhaps afterwards," he continued,  "I would paint a picture of your body as well." 

He laughed slowly.  

Mandy looked down the aisle where Rollie had disappeared.   Both diet Pepsi and diet Coke were on sale for the same price.  Fuzzenbon fiddled with a bag of M&M's, as if searching for a price tag.  Mandy looked around nervously.  No one else around.

"You know, for $250, I'll chop your dick off, would you like that?"  Mandy said this and dropped the sketch pad into his cart.

"You are such a tease to use such words, my dear.  Don't you like my handiwork?  Is it not art?"

Mandy began putting the last of the groceries onto the conveyor.  She ignored him now, but she felt a chill creep down her spine.  Her hands trembled.  She picked up a can of Ragu traditional style.  She thought she heard what seemed to be calliope music.  She was about to put the Ragu up on the counter when her fingers released the jar half a moment too early and it slipped, crashing into the tiled floor, the sauce oozing out from the broken glass. 

Fuzzenbon leaned over and looked at the mess.  He picked up the phone. "Clean-up on aisle five,"  he said and his voice carried over the PA, replacing what seemed to be calliope music for a moment.

The old man put away his sketch pad and put the artichoke and the pickle picker gadget on the conveyor.  Mandy noticed that he was missing his left index finger.  Then she noticed his other hand on her waist.  She suppressed a scream. 

"Don't worry about the mess," the old man said.  "Why don't you let me take you home with me," the old man half-whispered, half-sneered near her ear.  "You could assist me with my next project."  Mandy quickly looked away, her face flushed, and found herself staring over a tabloid headline that read LOSE OVER 50 POUNDS IN ONLY TWO WEEKS and on another, in smaller letters, WOMAN LOSES BOTH ARMS IN BIZARRE GARDENING ACCIDENT.

"You are quite the charmer, aren't you?"  Mandy said.  She looked deeply into the old man's dead eyes, her bottom lip trembling.  She heard herself say, "If you were twenty-five years younger I might consider it."  Then, in an instant, reflex action of blind determination she dashed the old man's crotch with a sharp knee blow that sent him doubled-up falling backwards into his cart, sliding on the spilt Ragu sauce.  He cried in agony as his cart slid quickly backwards and hit a stack of White Cloud bathroom tissue, toppling them over, leaving the old man groaning on his back. 

A very rotund gentleman with a blue name tag that read CHELPS in small, white, capital letters walked up with a mop.  "Clean-up on aisle five?" he said.  "Anybody think of calling 911?"  He then proceeded to mop up the spilt Ragu around the old man's prone body. 

Mandy could see that Rollie had come back and was now kneeling in front of a gumball machine, one of several such machines in a row at the front of the store. He turned the handle on the gumball machine clockwise - this for the third time and still no gumball.  He turned it again and then started shaking it (not roughly though because he didn't want to seem desperate).  He glanced around carefully then tried sticking his fingers up the metal chute, but it was useless.  No gumball.

Mandy was standing in front of the automatic doors, having retrieved another can of Ragu and handing Fuzzenbon a series of two dollar bills. 

"Keep it." she had said and Fuzzenbon pocketed $1.73. 

Mandy looked over to Rollie nervously and the automatic doors opened, then closed, opened, then closed, opened, then closed... her cart full of bagged groceries (paper, not plastic).  Meanwhile, Rollie forced the handle again.  This time counter-clockwise.  He gave it one more determined hard turn.  There was a strange clicking, almost a grinding sound.  Suddenly a dull pop somewhere in the heart of the machine shot out.  Then -- CRACK. 

Rollie yelled and held out his hands as the bubblegum machine vomited a hail of green and yellow and red and pink and white gumballs all over the floor.  He looked up and noticed Mandy.  "Oh, Hi," he grinned, pocketing the gumballs.  "What took you so long?"   He gathered as many gumballs as they shot out, stuffing them in his pockets.

"Could we just go now please." She waited for him to stand up and put the bag in the cart.

"I found my wallet," he said.  She looked at him.  He gave her a tentative smile and handed her a twenty dollar bill.  "I had left it in the car.  I forgot I had put it in the glove compartment."  He walked to her side.  "What happened to that dude over there on Aisle Five?"

"Nothing.  He's just some freak.  Let's go."  He held out his hand and smiled a faint smile as she took it and squeezed tightly. Together, they pushed the cart out of the grocery store, the automatic doors shutting behind them.