Chapter 3: Family Shopping Trip
The fluorescent lights of the supermarket hummed a sickly, unwavering note. It was a sound of enforced normalcy, a lie. Nothing was normal anymore. Not since we knelt on the kitchen floor. The grime from that linoleum felt permanently embedded in my kneecaps, a gritty phantom pain.
My father walked beside me, a ghost in a worn windbreaker. He hadn’t spoken since that night, three days ago. His silence was a new, heavy object in the house. Mom hadn’t left her room. The emptied fridge sat open and unplugged, a dark mouth in the wall.
Aisha had texted an address this morning. A command. Bring him.
So here we were, trailing behind her as she moved through the ‘Budget-Saver Mart’ like a battleship navigating a canal. The cart she’d commandeered wasn’t just full; it was a topography of her appetites. Cases of soda, family-size bags of chips, whole cured hams, bricks of cheese, and a precarious mountain of frozen pizzas formed its stratigraphy. The cart groaned and listed to one side, its wheels squealing in protest with every revolution.
Dad and I pushed it together, our combined weight barely enough to steer its clumsy mass. My shoulder burned where the metal edge dug in.
Aisha strode ahead, effortless, a queen surveying a pitiful kingdom. She wore tight, stretchy black leggings and a tank top that strained across her back. The apocalyptic landscape of a tattoo—a snarling, multi-headed beast—sprawled across the tremendous expanse of her shoulders, disappearing beneath the fabric. Her ass, those two immense shelves of flesh, each cheek wider than my torso, shifted with a slow, tectonic rhythm as she walked. People didn’t just stare. They froze. They backpedaled into displays of canned corn to avoid her orbit. A low-grade panic followed her through the store, a wave we small men were caught in.
She stopped at the rotisserie chicken carousel. The heat lamps glowed on her skin. She didn’t bother with tongs or packages. She simply reached over the glass shield, her arm brushing the heating elements without a flinch, and plucked a whole, glistening chicken from the rotating spike. She brought it to her face, inhaled deeply, and then took a bite directly from the breast.
The sound of her teeth tearing through skin and meat was loud, wet. Juice and grease ran in rivulets down her chin and wrist. She cheged, eyes scanning the nutritional information on a cereal box as if actually considering it.
“Too many carbs,” she muttered, swallowed, and took another massive bite, hollowing out the chicken’s cavity in seconds.
A stock boy, maybe sixteen, gaped from behind the deli counter. His name tag said ‘Kevin’. Aisha caught his eye. She held his gaze as she crushed the remaining bones in her fist, a dry, splintering crunch. She dropped the crumpled carcass into our cart. It landed on a bag of potato chips with a soft, oily thud.
“Two more,” she said to Kevin, her voice muffled by chicken.
He scrambled to obey.
She ate the second chicken while we moved to the dairy aisle. She consumed it with a methodical, brutal efficiency, stripping meat from bone with her teeth, sucking the marrow from snapped ribs. By the third chicken, she’d developed a rhythm. A bite. A chew. A glance at us.
“You two look hungry,” she said, a thread of dark amusement in her voice. She held out a gnawed drumstick, glistening with her saliva. “Open up.”
My stomach turned to ice. Dad, beside me, went rigid. The cart stopped.
“I’m not kidding,” she said, her tone dropping. The pleasant facade vanished. “You pushed my cart. You get a tip. Open your fucking mouths.”
The aisle was deserted now. But I could feel eyes from the ends of the row, peering around stacks of yogurt cups. Shame, hot and liquid, poured into my veins. I looked at my father. His face was a mask of utter devastation. He opened his mouth, a tiny, helpless motion.
Aisha leaned down and placed the slippery, saliva-slick bone between his teeth. He made a small gagging sound but held it.
“Now you,” she said to me, selecting a vertebrae from the carcass. It was slick with grease and bits of soft tissue. The smell of paprika and her spittle filled my nostrils. I opened my mouth. She placed the bone on my tongue. The taste was foul, profoundly violating—cold fat, her saliva, the ghost of the dead bird. I had to clamp my jaw to stop from retching.
“Good girls,” she cooed, straightening up. She wiped her hands on her leggings, leaving dark streaks. “Don’t drop them. You’ll collect the bones. It’s tidy.”
We pushed the groaning cart forward, the bones in our mouths like bits in a horse’s teeth. My jaw ached. Saliva pooled, threatening to dislodge the thing. I dared not swallow.
At the freezer section, she stopped before the ice cream. She studied the pints, then leaned her forearms on the glass door of the ice cream freezer case. It was a casual gesture for her. The glass, under the localized weight of her, creaked ominously. A complex webbing of cracks appeared instantly, a frozen spiderweb radiating from the point of contact.
She didn’t seem to notice. “Rocky road,” she declared, and yanked the lever. The door, its structural integrity compromised, gave way with a sharp crack. The entire sheet of safety glass splintered but held together in its frame, now a distorted mosaic. Alarm bells began a faint, distant chirping from the front of the store.
Aisha reached through the broken glass, unbothered by the shards, and pulled out four pints. She tucked them under her arm like newspapers. “Keep moving,” she said, as the chirping grew more insistent.
We rounded the corner toward the registers. The chaos at the freezer case had drawn a small crowd, which now parted for Aisha as if by magnetic repulsion. The cashier, a pimpled young man with a look of profound resignation, watched her approach. He’d seen her before. Everyone here had. His eyes flicked to the shattered freezer door, then to the manager hustling over, a walkie-talkie in his hand.
The manager, a paunchy man in a short-sleeved dress shirt, moved to block the end of the aisle. “Ma’am, you’re going to have to pay for that damage, and we’ll need to see receipts for those items—”
Aisha looked down at him. She didn’t speak. She just slowly, deliberately, brought the half-eaten third rotisserie chicken to her mouth and took another bite. She chewed, maintaining eye contact. A droplet of grease landed on his tie.
He looked from her face, to the cart heaped with hundreds of dollars of groceries, to my father and me standing there with bones in our mouths, trembling as we held the cart. He saw the dynamic, the sheer physics of the situation, with a clerk’s swift calculus. The cost of the glass versus the cost of a lawsuit, or an ambulance.
He stepped aside, his face flushed. “Have a… have a nice day.”
Aisha finished swallowing. She dropped the final chicken skeleton into the cart, right on top of a loaf of bread. “I know,” she said.
We pushed the cart through the checkout lane. The cashier scanned nothing. He just stared at his screen, jaw tight, as Aisha led our procession out the automatic doors into the harsh afternoon light.
In the parking lot, she finally stopped by a beaten-up sedan that sat low on its shocks. She began transferring bags from the cart to the car’s back seat, which sank nearly to the floor under the weight.
“The bones,” she said, without turning around.
My father and I looked at each other. A silent, horrible understanding passed between us. We took the slick, greasy things from our mouths. My father held his, a pathetic little knob of bone, in his open palm. I did the same.
“In the cart,” she said.
We dropped them onto the pile of other discarded bones. They landed with soft, insignificant taps.
Aisha finished loading the car and slammed the door. The vehicle rocked. She turned to us, wiping her hands again on her thighs. She looked from my father’s ashen, broken face to mine. Her expression was one of cool assessment, like a sculptor judging raw clay.
“You did okay,” she said to my father. It was the first vaguely non-hostile thing she’d ever said to him. His eyes widened slightly, a flicker of something awful—gratitude?—in their depths. She saw it. Her smile returned, not cruel this time, but possessive. Absolute.
She tapped my chest with a thick finger. “You. Tomorrow. My place. We’re studying.” The word was a blatant euphemism, heavy with promise and threat.
Then she looked at my father again. “You can think about today. About how it felt to be useful.”
She got into the car. The chassis groaned, settling like a dying animal. The engine started with a cough. She didn’t look back as she drove away, the car’s rear bumper nearly scraping the asphalt.
We stood there in the empty parking space, the abandoned, bone-littered cart between us. The supermarket doors slid open and shut, open and shut, sucking in and expelling the conditioned air. The normal world continued, just over there.
My father’s hand touched my shoulder, a frail, weightless thing. I turned to him. He wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at the spot where Aisha’s car had vanished, his eyes wide and unblinking. On his lips, a faint, greasy smear glistened in the sun.
He wasn’t crying. He wasn’t angry.
He was remembering the taste.