Things i saw in the grocery parking lot

A woman almost dropped her baby, or more specifically, her husband almost dropped the baby and she caught it. I don’t know why I phrased it that way in the first place.

The baby was fine, in fact, this was the moment it learned to walk. This is the moment any of us learn to walk. I followed it walking with only my eyes as it passed two people loading their groceries into the back of their SUV. 

One of these two people spit as they spoke. Disease passes over our tongues into the mouths of others, one of these two people had it figured out, I thought, and I thought of all the old words I learned from my parents.

A little man gets out of his normal sized car and stops the normal sized girl who is loading the groceries into the open vehicles, yelling something at her, maybe a foot or so away. I can see the spit dancing out of his mouth, too, to be free of someone like that.

People shop for flowers in the adjacent garden centre. Nobody actually buys anything. There are rows of them and they all look so beautiful and so fresh, it’s the perfect season for them, sure. They don’t know they aren’t wanted, I can tell because it’s what all of us look like before we realize it.

The baby pulls at one of the flowers and it swallows him whole with violence. I’m sorry there’s no more poetic way to put it, some things are exactly as they are. Nobody blinks an eye. It all seems very typical, I guess.

And aren’t we lucky it wasn’t one of us.