BY Kaj Tanaka
We are at the grocery store looking for expensive cheeses and salad kits in the discount bin like
we do. There’s an old man kind of hovering over our shoulder. He acts impressed with our finds.
We puff, but we try to ignore him. He wants to tell us about how he used to live here “just here,”
he points down the dairy aisle—back before this was a grocery store, when this lot used to be an
apartment complex.
We don’t say anything because we do not want to encourage this old man. There are
certain people who come to the grocery store, we have noticed, not to look for discount cheeses
and salad kits, but to strike up conversations with strangers.
“Just here,” he says, “is where I used to sleep—for years I slept right here, and then one
day I wasn’t allowed, and then it turned into a place where people shop for cheese. Do you see
how strange that is?”
The song “Livin’ on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi comes on, and everyone in the store stops to
remember how Tommy used to work on the docks until his union went on strike. And then
there’s Gina who dreams of running away. We are all tired, I think, and we are not free. We are
not our masters.
“But I just keep coming here,” the old man says when the song stops playing. He is still
talking, even though we are leaving; he raises his voice so we can hear him across the local beef
jerky display, which claims to be made 100% from locally sourced meat. “Sometimes even I get my shopping done,” he says. And he laughs—a joke so funny, as they say, we forget to. And as
we turn down the baking needs aisle, he is still chuckling to himself, looking at the yogurt,
wiping his eyes.
Kaj Tanaka's fiction has appeared in New South, The New Ohio Review, and Tin House and has been selected for Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf’s Top 50. Kaj is the former fiction editor of Gulf Coast. He lives in rural New Mexico.