fiction by Jason Edwards
Liam is afraid to drive across bridges. Which sucks for someone who lives, works, plays and learns in and around Seattle. It’s close to 3 PM on a Tuesday in June and I’m driving Liam’s car. He met me at the airport, gave me a handshake and a brohug, threw my bag into the back seat and then got in on the passenger side. You want me to drive? And he said Yes, Liam is afraid to drive across bridges. In third person like that.
Traffic is terrible but the kind of terrible I’m used to. 6 months in LA. There might be a reason for someone to go to LA, but there are reasons to go other places first and if you’re lucky you’ll die before you use up those reasons.
Liam says, Where’s the party.
Safeway.
Fuck. Which one.
The one on 155th and Aurora.
Fuck. Shoreline?
Yeah.
Why?
I don’t know. Because they don’t charge for bags there, since it’s not Seattle, it’s Shoreline.
Fuck.
***
This part would be in italics if I thought whatever medium, you’re reading this in could handle it. But I can’t take that risk. I got a Facebook message from Kareem. He wanted to tell me he was going to throw a party. In Seattle. In a grocery store. Just let people eat and drink what they wanted and he’d pay for it. Why not. I sent a message back, saying I’d fly up for it. He told me not to tell Liam. So I told Liam, asked if I could get a ride from the airport. The day before my flight, Liam sent me back a message: Okay.
***
The traffic on highway 5 gets better after 130th, about a mile from our exit. I take 145th, a mile to Aurora, which is also Highway 99, old highway 99, not really a highway, just a busy street with old motels, old Taco Bells, and about a thousand tree dispensaries. I turn right on Aurora, and I’d be able to see all the way to Alaska if I had better vision and the Earth didn’t curve. But it does, the Earth curves.
Liam asks me to park his car as far away from the front doors as possible. It’s a gorgeous day. The sunshine is perfect, the blue sky is perfect, the sounds of radio stations through open car windows on Aurora is perfect.
There are two entrances into the Safeway. What time does the party start? Liam asks me.
2 PM.
Fuck.
We make our way towards the entrance more on the left. The one on the right has girl scouts in front of it.
***
Another part in italics. I’m not good at flashbacks—this one is from about two minutes ago. I turned off the car and didn’t say anything. Liam didn’t either. He just sat there, kind of hunched, like he was going to be sick or was finally done being sick. Then he opened the glove compartment. Just in case, man, he said. Then he got out. I looked into the glove compartment—it was empty except for a Sig Sauer P220 Platinum Elite with an ergonomic beavertail grip, front cocking serrations, front strap checkering, and custom aluminum grips (according to the website). It smelled used.
***
Inside the Safeway I lose Liam almost immediately. I see Jordan and Dane walking up the cold beer aisle. Kim has a shopping basket and she’s looking at the wall of gift cards. One of Kelly’s kids comes racing out of the aisle with all of the baking stuff, turns a corner and zips up soups. I walk towards chips and seasonal, and find Van and Shelly. Van’s talking to a skinny guy with bad hair.
Shelly’s smiling. Shelly’s always smiling.
Hey Jason, Shelly says.
Hey.
Long time.
Yeah.
LA?
Yeah.
Suddenly the skinny guy with bad hair throws a punch at Van. Van takes it, laughs. I’d say you punch like a girl, Steve, but my daughter punches harder than that, Van says. The skinny guy stomps off. I head toward milk.
I can’t decide between buttermilk or half and half. I’m not going to drink any. I paid a thousand dollars to a kid in LA to get me UC, so I could work on my abs. I finally choose some non-dairy creamer.
I walk towards produce. I see Kim looking at celery.
Hey Kim.
Hey you’re back. She gives me a hug. She’s good at it.
I saw you by the gift cards. Kareem’s paying for gift cards too?
Oh, no. I paid for those myself. It’s my sister’s birthday next week. Where’s Liam?
Liam?
Didn’t he give you a ride?
Yeah.
Don’t let him see the girl scouts.
What girl scouts.
The one’s selling cookies.
Why.
The store manager is letting them sell cookies inside, to us. But not in the cookie aisle.
Maybe Liam’s in the cookie aisle, then.
I hope he is. When are you going back to LA?
Never I hope. Tomorrow.
Celery is too damn expensive.
I know.
No calories.
I know.
You look good.
UC.
Is that why you’re drinking non-dairy creamer?
***
Italics again. A trick I learned at a party in Westwood. Carry something you don’t like to drink, so you don’t accidentally drink it. Because when you go to parties, the instinct is to sip whatever’s in your hand. I learned the trick from a girl with the straightest, blondest hair I’d ever seen. I forgot her name. Either that, or I can’t think of something deeply pithy and symbolic to call her right now.
***
If this was a house party, everybody would be in the kitchen. What’s the equivalent in a grocery store. I walk to the deli. A bunch of people I don’t know. As I get closer, I realize they’re all pharmacists, so they must be Desiree’s coworkers. They are all of them extremely drunk. They are having a lot of fun. They’re talking about one of their coworkers, one of them that they really hate.
I try the aisle that has dog food and baby stuff in it. It smells really horrible. In the next aisle is household cleaners. Alan and Helen are sitting in folding chairs, drinking lemonade and eating chips. Alan has his iPhone plugged into a portable speaker, and they’re listening to Mumford and Sons. Or maybe The Lumineers. Or maybe Phillip Phillips. Alan is a doctor. Hey Jason, he says. UC? Looking good, brother! I honestly believe he is genuinely happy for me.
***
6 months earlier, right before I left for LA. Liam and I went to Uneeda Burger, in Fremont. Why LA? he said.
I’m trying to get UC, I said. I know a guy who knows a guy, and besides…
Besides what? he said, taking a gigantic bite out of his cowboy burger. Barbecue sauce gooshes out and the smell is incredible. Foreshadowing. I gulped down hefeweizen. I hated hefeweizen.
I shrugged. I dunno. Usually this would be the part of the story where I finally reveal that my mom was dead. Or my dad. Or I got dumped by a girl who later got hooked bad on drugs.
Wife? He said, frowning.
Doesn’t exist yet, I said.
And she never will, he said, and we fist bumped. Let’s go get some Tagalongs.
It was the saddest day of my life.
***
There’s no one the Asian aisle, which has Mexican food in it too, and Indian, and Kosher. I walk through it to the front of the store. Chelsea is talking to a check-out girl, and her fiancée Walter is flipping through tabloids. The other Chelsea walks through the front doors, takes off her sunglasses, blinks a few times, puts her sunglasses back on and walks out again. In the video section, there’s, like, a hundred girls scouts. They are terrifying.
***
I wrote a short story, once, called “The Taffy Mafia.” It was supposed to be a sort of spoof on zombies. Except instead of the walking undead, there’s these little girls running around, almost feral, selling taffy for some school fund raiser. No one gets hurt in the story, no one’s even in danger. But everyone is scare shitless. They’re even more scared than when, a while earlier, the town really was overrun by actual flesh eating zombies.
I submitted the story to a literary journal, a no-name rag run out of a no-name community college. It was nominated for a Pushcart prize. It won. I stopped writing after that.
***
The girl scouts come to some sort of conclusion, and scatter. Except for one girl scout, who looks like she’s about nine years old. Her girl scout clothes are pristine. Perfect. Her hair is golden blonde and the curls are absolutely perfect. Her rosy cheeks. Her bright blue eyes. Her perfect white teeth as she smiles. She reaches up to grab a copy of Sex Lies and Videotape. At her feet are other DVDs: Bad Influence, Crash, Two Days in the Valley. I start to get very queasy.
The party’s starting to wind down. The windows are tinted, but eventually the light doesn’t change every time the door opens. So the sky is now the color of tinted windows.
Crystal and Kevin are at one of the self-check lanes. Kevin’s running the same bag of mini carrots over the UPC reader, over and over again. Every time it goes beep, Kevin says “Fuck you, Kareem,” and Crystal says “Yeah.”
The bakery section. Laura, Tammy, Melody, Eric, and Keith are sprawled. They look like dead angels. Greasy hair, flushed cheeks, dirt underneath their fingernails, perfect abs, perfect fucking abs, every single one of them.
I decide to find Liam so I can leave.
***
The last little interlude. The big epiphany. The whole point of the story. The chunk of cookie lodged in my throat that makes me choke. Anticlimax.
***
Liam’s in the cookie aisle. He’s sitting, he’s crying, he’s shoving handfuls of girl scout thin mints into his mouth, chewing them, brown goo pouring out of his mouth. There are boxes all around him, like dead soldiers, dead children in a schoolyard massacre, dead bugs beneath a bug zapper, dead fish at low tide, rumpled up tissues surrounding the most persistent nose bleed of all time. But they’re just boxes, green and cheery.
Liam looks up at me as I approach. Dark circles under his wet eyes, nose is running, and all that chewed up cookie drooling from his cookie-soaked chin. The Safeway fluorescents make his skin look yellow, like old damp newspaper.
Please Jason, he says.
I pull out the Sig Sauer, point it at his forehead.
Oh god, thank you, he says, Thank you god, thank you god.
I pull the trigger. There’s a lot of blood. A lot of blood. But there’s way more chewed-up cookie.
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