Attention shoppers: our restroom facilities will be temporarily unavailable while one of our Hypermart Associates scrapes the semen out of the grout. We pride ourselves in consistently achieving high standards of tidiness and we apologize for any inconvenience.
***
I came for the ripe fruit. Juliette, my wife, had awoken that morning with a wild longing for it. Fruit, that is. The poor young dear was nearly nine months pregnant—
over
ripe, I thought—with my would be first-born child. So it had fallen upon me to drive out to the Hypermart of greater Gary, Indiana to fetch some figs.
I scrutinized each section of aisle twelve, selecting the most succulent specimens and piling them in my oversized cart: glossy apples, shapely pears, sensual pomegranates, great juicy melons, a bunch of large bananas, and a particularly sadistic pineapple. I subjected each to individual inspection, admiring their colors and testing their softness with my thumbs. Was the scent pleasing? If so I bagged the fruit and asphyxiated it with a twist tie.
Satisfied with my plunder, I wheeled over to aisle nine to search for bargains—another husbandly mission. Juliette had sent coupons with me—5% off your second Blowsuck leaf blower/sucker with purchase of Xtra Long Handjob Drain Snake or other Handjob product of greater or equal value. She shares this coupon fetish with my mother.
Back to college savings! 10% off all dorm room supplies!
College! Goodness, I thought, with a child on the way I ought to open an account. I peered down aisle seven. Parents and their freshman boys and girls browsed the racks, picking out bathmats and toilet brushes, the teens adopting the universal cross-armed
mom-you're-ruining-my-life
posture of people who wish they weren't so helplessly submissive to their elders.
A cart emerged from aisle six, preceding a horse of a mother and then—break my heart!—a wingless seraph: young legs in short jean shorts, young painted feet in sandals, young breasts restrained by a flimsy sleeveless top, a frizzy mane of auburn hair, and two green eyes filled with man-slaying acid.
Attention!
cried my heart, and my homunculus obeyed.
The poison eyes met mine and lingered for a short moment, but a moment long enough to betray a degree of curiosity apart from the indifference with which girls of her age generally regard men of mine. But nonsense, I thought, I'm not yet thirty. Could I pass for one of her peers? I banished the notion as irrelevant. My appetite was aroused. I quickly diverted my attention to a chest of drawers, which I began to examine with great interest. The mother's smoke detector must not sound. A drawer for shirts, a drawer for skirts, a drawer for the chest, and a drawer for drawers. Fascinating.
Mother Bear and her sultry, sullen daughter disappeared down aisle eight, presumably to select new sheets for the young one's bunk bed. I returned to my cart with its fresh-picked harvest, which seemed duller now that I had bigger fruit to pick.
18-years-old—a dangerous age. The rules of sexual fantasy do not permit the mention of a person one day younger, no matter how consensual the situation. But upon her eighteenth birthday a girl is lawfully approved and fit for the raping (though such savagery is not at all my modus). I am a gentleman, and a gentleman always engages a lady first by means of a written invitation, which is precisely how I resolved to proceed.
I tore out one of Juliette's idiotic coupons and scrawled a note on the back: "You're more beautiful than you can know. Respond if you want to be wanted."
How shall I give it to her? I thought. Surely I couldn't just hand her the note with the mother hovering around. I'd have to stalk them discreetly and pounce when the right moment came. I watched them turn the corner of aisle nine, their cart now filled with innocent white bedding. Green-eyes plucked an electric tea kettle from the shelf. I was electrified, boiling, nearly blowing steam. I must have this girl, I thought.
She dropped her phone, and bent to pick it up. Her hamstrings tightened, the muscles of her inner thigh became defined, and at the fraying edge of her shorts I discerned the crease of skin that divides the leg from the buttock—as one often can when oblivious young girls wear very short shorts—and as she grabbed her phone I was granted an infinitesimal flash of her pink panties peering out from within the crotch of her scant... Daisy Dukes! That's what they call them!
"Damn," she said, "It's scratched." I pounced.
"Let me take a look at it. I own a phone repair business, we fix these problems all the time. Scratches, broken screens, water damage, you name it. I make sure nice girls like you get discounts. Here, take my card—Hazzard Repair Services Limited at your service. Have a blessed day."
I had snatched the girl's phone before blurting out this terrible gibberish. I handed it back to her with my folded coupon underneath. I quickly returned to my cart and fairly rode it out of the aisle, chariot-like. Mom stared at me but said nothing.
I was sweating like an action hero. What have I done? I thought. Will these people call the police? I'll go to jail, they'll take my child away. It's all over with. I've got to flee. I must get to the car; it's only a matter of minutes now before the bastards start closing in. I've got to make it to Canada before nightfall, before the news gets out. What will Juliette think? She'll see it all on CNN: the aerial camera looking down on my fleeing car, the fleet of sirens closing in as I swerve onto some back road, the gunshot that ruptures my tire, and then the horrible spectacle of ten beastly cops beating me into the asphalt with billy clubs and other savage tools of law enforcement.
No, no, calm down, I thought. You haven't done anything illegal. The worst you'll get is a stern lecture. You might get shouted at, pecked a bit my the hen. They'll probably kick you out of the store. That's fair. You'll regather the fruit somewhere else. It's no problem. I heard no noises of motherly consternation from the aisle over. I took this as a good sign. Had the girl even read the note?
I pushed my cart down the passage that runs perpendicular to the shopping aisles, following mother and child, who strolled down the passage on the opposite side. They didn't seem to take notice. The girl made not a glance in my direction. Aisle seven, aisle six, aisle five. Were they headed for checkout?
No. Suddenly they stopped at aisle four, and the girl said something to her mother. I hid between aisle five (light bulbs) and aisle four (canned foods). I heard her fairy footsteps flip-flopping toward me. To my great shock she stopped at the end of the aisle, looked me in the eye, and whispered reprovingly.
"Not so close you idiot. Here."
She handed me my coupon and trotted back to mama. I unscrunched the paper. She had written another note beneath my words: "Text me ###-###-####"
I was breathless. Her wide eyes had implored me with the most innocent and undisguised longing, an honest expression of desire of which no trace remains in the suspicious and disdainful eyes of women only three or four years her senior. And of course, the phone! Why hadn't it occurred to me? These kids exist inside their gadgets. The way to a girl's heart is through her toys.
Not so close you idiot.
I must stand back, I thought. I about-faced and wheeled in the direction of the fresh foods, away from my fresh
femme
and the foul
Frau.
Aisle six, aisle seven, aisle eight.
Attention shoppers: make Hypermart your Number One destination for ripe produce and fresh meat. Please commit adultery with the hot college coed before she and her mother check out in fifteen minutes. Thank you for shopping at Hypermart, where our business is your satisfaction.
Aisle ten, aisle eleven. The loudspeaker was right, I had to hurry. I must text the girl, I thought. But what to say?
"Hey baby girl." No, no way. Completely outrageous. That I had even generated the idea of texting such foolishness forced me to question my very capacity to make rational judgments.
What about "I want you"? Insane. I'd sound like a serial rapist, like some heavy breathing Neanderthal out of a slash and fuck horror flick. A SWAT team would smash the windows. I'd be carried out in a straight jacket in ten minute's time. For how long has my sexual acumen languished? I wondered. Had I lost the ability to flirt?
"It's your admirer ;)" That's what I went with. I thought she'd like the emoticon. What a fool I was.
I pocketed my phone and shivered as I pretended to examine some flank steak. I was all but sick with anticipation.
Buzz—
a little paroxysm of joy in my pocket. I'll never match the speed at which a teen girl texts.
"ur cute too" Sweet semen of Christ, I thought. When I was her age girls used to tell me "ur cute" on AOL Instant Messager. I was raping my own past. I was still awestruck by the speed of her reply. I needed to be quick as well. A response, a response, my manhood for a response.