“Connie?”
Danette had picked up the heaviest shampoo bottle and stood slightly behind Adam.
“A boating accident… It was really tragic. They never found all of her. But gosh, here I am sounding all morbid, when I finally see you again. I’m sorry--I just happened to recognize you, and wanted to say ‘hello’ before you got away again. Would you like to go get some coffee?”
A male voice behind me said, “I don’t think so,” and then a big meaty hand went to my shoulder as an arm extended around me. Lots of tattoos. All I could see of him was muscles, black t-shirt, and a shaved head as he introduced himself “I’m Tom. Mags’ fiancé.”
I had a tattooed fiancé?
“Oh, wow,” Adam said, shaking Tom’s hand. “You’re a biker?”
“And a cop,” and I swear to you, that’s when Danette had to sit down, right there in the aisle, and breathe into her shopping bag. “Mags,” he said, “honey, we have to be going. I think your mom’s supposed to show up at eight.”
Which is when Adam mumbled something awkward and walked away and Tom—or whatever his name was—held me back a second.
“Stay here,” he ordered, and within sixty seconds, I saw why: Police had converged at the front of the Megamart and had Adam in cuffs.
Danette says that’s when I fainted.
“What made you suspicious?” I asked Tom, hours later, sipping coffee in the café.
“He’s wanted for murder in three states, Mags.” He liked calling me Mags, even though I had corrected him five times already. “You’re the ex who got away. Your name was on a list, so we put a tail on you.”
“Tail?”
He thumbed toward himself and smiled. “And seriously? You look great in jeans. But that little black dress you bought last week? Let’s take that puppy out for dinner.”
Well. I did have the dress already.
A Fish Called Lazarus
By Jeff Vande Zande
A black blur flits along the ceiling.
“I just saw a bird,” John says. “Maybe a swallow.”
Jared, the front end manager, looks up. “They get in here sometimes,” he says. He taps the barcode scanning wand. “So, you think you got this?”
John nods. “I used to do returns at Roth’s.”
“Well, get me on the walkie-talkie if you have any questions.”
Not much older than my grandson, John thinks, studying Jared. If he plays his cards right, John guesses he could move up into management. He worked at Roth’s Sporting Goods downtown for twenty-eight years. That experience has to count for something.
In between customers returning everything from peanut butter to car batteries, John watches the swallow fly from one end of the store to the other. He looks at his watch and realizes the church service is just beginning. He doesn’t like to miss and yet feels he’s too new to start asking for any specific hours off. Roth’s was always closed on Sundays.
“I think it’s trapped,” John says, pointing out the bird to a young woman with her two children.
The woman looks up and then looks at John. “I don’t want an exchange,” she says, pushing a broken curling iron closer to him. “I just want my money back.”
“We can do that,” he says. Her children stare into the screens of their hand-held video games. “You boys see that bird?” he asks.
The woman looks at her unresponsive children and then at John. “We’re in a bit of a hurry.”
He nods.
Later, a man and his son approach the counter. The little boy holds a plastic bag filled with water. A dead angel fish floats at the surface.
The father takes the bag from his son’s hand and sets it and a receipt on the counter. “We need to exchange this.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” John says. He slides the wand over the receipt. His screen tells him the fish was purchased nearly six months ago. He rubs his palms together. “Our return policy on fish is three days. I don’t think—”
“Let me talk to a supervisor.”
John crosses his arms. “Sir, a supervisor is only—”
“I want to talk to a supervisor.”
Exhaling, John calls for Jared on the walkie-talkie. The young man arrives quickly, speaks briefly, and in a short time the father and boy are on their way. They have a note that tells the associate in the pet department to give them another angel fish.
John turns to Jared. “I don’t understand. The policy—”
Jared crosses his arms. “You know how many people he’s going to tell about this? That’s great PR for seven fifty.”
The weekend before, John had been sent to the sporting goods department. The fishing aisle needed to be put back together after the opening of trout season had left it in shambles. While John re-shelved, a man came in and picked up a package of fly fishing flies. John wanted to tell him they were garbage. Then again, why tell him? Megamart was about the only place in town to get flies since Roth’s had closed.
Instead, he talked to the man, found out he and his thirteen-year-old son were taking up fly fishing together. The man was worried that his kid wouldn’t like it…that he’d be bored.
“I just want him to get a fish.”
John spent a half-hour with the man. He named some of the best rivers. He told him the best times of day for each. He drew maps to some good holes.
Ten minutes after the man left, the manager of Sporting Goods approached John. John expected a pat on the shoulder, but instead the manager gave him a warning for wasting time. When met with John’s explanation, the manager only said, “Well, this isn’t Roth’s…just get this aisle cleaned up.”
At the time, John didn’t understand the appeal of places like Megamart. How could a place like Roth’s have been driven out of business?
Standing now, listening to Jared, John had his answer. People didn’t want the quality and time that Roth’s could give. They wanted fish brought back to life. They wanted to make their seven fifty goes as far as possible. They wanted flashy miracles. Megamart was easy to believe in.
“Don’t get abusive, but think long-term payoff when you’re working Returns,” Jared says. “Read the customer.” He starts to walk away.
“Hey, Jared,” John asks. “What happens to the birds?”
Jared gives him a puzzled look and then glances toward the ceiling. “The night crew says they sometimes find the bodies when they’re polishing the floors.”
John imagines the exhaustion of their panicked flight, their search for anything natural…a way out.
House Names
By James Reasoner
Let’s see, we’ll move this one down here…it doesn’t need to be at eye level…and put this one next to that one…L’Amour doesn’t need any help selling, we’ll put his books all the way at the bottom…shift this romance over…
“What do you think you’re doing?”
The angry voice interrupted my rearranging of the book section in Megamart. I looked over. The woman frowning at me was very pretty, but she looked mad.
I was honest. ”I’m putting my books where I think they’ll sell better.”
She looked at the books I’d moved to eye level, next to each other so shoppers could see all three titles at the same time. ”You’re Chad Dugan?”
“One of them. Chad Dugan doesn’t really exist. Several people write under that name. It’s what in the publishing business they call a house name.”
The woman wasn’t wearing a Megamart vest. She was dressed nicely in brown slacks and a beige blouse. The jewelry she wore looked expensive, and so did she, if you know what I mean.
“No offense, but what business is it of yours if I move some books around? You don’t work here, do you?”
“No, I don’t work here, but it’s my business because that’s one ofmy books you stuck down there where nobody can see it.”
I frowned and looked at the book I’d just moved, with its cover painting of an impossibly buff, longhaired guy holding a sword. ”
Wait a minute. You’re Serenity Dawes?”
She gave her blonde hair a toss that was probably meant to be defiant. ”That’s right. I’m an author. So you don’t have to be so condescending when you explain what a house name is.”
“Sorry.” I reached down and picked up the three copies of her book, but I didn’t put them back where they’d been. I put them in a better spot. ”There you go.”
“Thank you.”
“You know, this is actually the first time I’ve run into another writer in Megamart.”
The anger had faded from her eyes. ”You do this a lot? Rearranging bookshelves?”
I put a sheepish grin on my face. ”Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do. I travel. All a writer needs is a laptop and an Internet connection. Whenever I pass a Megamart, I check to see if it has any of my books. When it does, I try to give them any advantage I can. These days, every sale matters.”
She smiled and nodded. ”Tell me about it. The shrinking midlist. It’s a challenge for romance writers, too.”
We were hitting it off. It was a “meet-cute” like in the movies. After we’d spent a few minutes chatting about writing—the usual stuff about how hard it is to get an agent and what a struggle it is sometimes to get the publishers to write a check—I took it to the next logical step.
“Why don’t we go get a cup of coffee? I love talking writing.” Nothing threatening about that, nothing that would scare her off. When a guy like me is lucky enough to meet a woman like Serenity Dawes, you don’t want to spook her.
Serenity thought about it for a couple of seconds, then nodded. “Sure. I guess that would be all right. There’s a little place in the front of the store—”
I made a face. “Surely there’s something better around here. You know the area, so wherever you say is OK with me.”
“Well, there’s a good coffee shop two blocks from here.”
“That’s fine. “I motioned toward the store entrance.” We can each take our own car, I guess.”
“All right, let’s go, Chad.”
We started toward the doors but hadn’t gotten there when a couple cops came in. They hurried toward us. Serenity backed away.
“Shit!”
She turned to run, but it was too late. One of the cops grabbed her arm.
“Damn it, Phyllis, you haven’t been out of prison a month yet, and you’ve already started again!”
I spoke up, angry and confused. “What’s going on here, officer? I think you’ve got the wrong woman. This is Serenity Dawes, the author.”
The cop shook his head as he pulled her arms behind her back and slipped plastic restraints on her wrists. “No, sir, this is Phyllis Milligan, who pretends to be an author so she can lure guys like you into the parking lot and rob you. She pulled the same stunt here last night. We’ve got her on the security video, and we’ve been waiting for her to come in so we could grab her.”
The two of them started to lead her away. The cop who had spoken to me looked back over his shoulder to add, “You’re a lucky man. A few more minutes and you would’ve been her next victim.”
I blew out my breath. “You’re right. Thank you, officer.”
As soon as they left, I got out of there, too. glanced up at the security cameras covering the parking lot. They had blind spots, and I saw them all. I had parked in one of them. I would have gotten the woman over to my car with some excuse. Then it would have been a simple matter to get her in the car, where the duct tape was waiting.
And the knives.
I’d almost panicked when I saw the cops. I thought they had caught up to me at last. But like one of them said, I was lucky.
I drove away into the night. There was another town down the road. It would have a Megamart, too.
And, chances were, some Chad Dugan books on its shelves.
A New Game
By Kyle Minor
His wife was eight months pregnant. After dinner she said her stomach hurt and she was going to bed. Then she asked him to bring her things. A cold cloth. The heating pad with the orange and yellow flowered coverslip. Some ginger ale. Some ice for the ginger ale. As soon as he brought her one thing she wanted another. He tired of bringing her things but knew better than to tell her so.
They now lived in what she called a small town and what he called the country. She had grown up on a farm and he had grown up in the city. She said it was charming to live in a quaint house on a dirt road. He thought but did not say that it was horrifying to live in a shithole in the sticks, and he was afraid what his mother would say when she came to visit the new baby. When the peahen came from next door, his wife could spend six hours staring at it through the screen door, feeding it bread, feeding it soybeans. For every luminant blue speck on the peahen’s neck, he could catalog a bar where married women picked up college boys, a movie theater where trannies took tabs of acid at the laser light show, the gradations of green on the street signs he passed walking home at two or three in the morning after another evening of trouble. He had a nose for the bar fight, the slick scam, the couple yelling in the street near dawn. She said, “Here we have Billy. We have Sherri.” The next door neighbors. Billy, with his guns, who didn’t drink, who frowned at cursing or dirty jokes, whose one indoor vice was dominoes till dawn. And Sherri, Skinny Sherri and Fat Sherri, whose primary preoccupation was watching and reporting on her fluctuations in weight.
From the bedroom, his wife called again. The flicker, she said. Not the remote control, the flicker. All right, he said. Soon the distance between the walls to his left and right would collapse to zero and squeeze all the air from the house, the room, his lungs. But there was no place to escape into drink, nobody to tell the one about the blind man and his dominatrix, no sidewalk for walking, no lights to light it. The only thing to do was drive to the 24-hour Megamart for the eighteenth night in a row, shop the rows of flat screen plasma TVs, run his fingers along the grooves of the pressboard furniture, buy another hair rock CD and call it irony. Poison, Cinderella, Stryper, Great White.
Crackers, his wife said. Let me check the cabinet, he said. He took down the one half-empty bag and carried it out the front door. I’ll have to go get you some, he said. You’re sweet, she said. Anything for you, baby, he said.
All the dirt roads were named for trees. Red Oak, White Oak, Swamp Oak, Shingle Oak. There were no signs but he had studied the county plats. He had become the kind of person who studied the county plats. He turned onto the paved road that ran between the orange groves. He saw rows of Valencia branches grafted onto sour lemon rootstock. He had become the kind of person who knew about citrus.
At the rise behind the farthest field, he saw the lights first above the trees, then the high warehouse roof, then the rear end of the store, the tractor-trailer unloading, the cardboard baler, the giant fence around the dumpsters. He parked, made eye contact with the elderly greeter, pushed the cart around, seized on a new game. He’d follow the first young and pretty girl he saw.
In Lawn and Garden, he found his girl. She was a little thick in the butt for his liking, but she was shaped all right, and he liked the way she moved. He followed her at varying distances, through Automotive, through Sporting Goods, through Home Furnishings, through the Toy section. He threw things into the cart he didn’t intend to buy. He imagined a future for him and her, lofty words. Her name was Esmeralda. I’ll take you out of this place, Esmeralda. I’ll make us a home. He saw himself kissing her on the roof of some building somewhere, making love in some stairwell, eating some breakfast she made him in the kitchen, her long T-shirt not quite covering the behind he now fixed upon. Her ex-husband burst through the backdoor, fresh from prison, and he hit him with a kitchen stool.
Somewhere between Menswear and Electronics, she stopped her cart abruptly and turned to face him, and when she turned she was not Esmeralda. She was Fat Sherri. Or, this week, Skinny Sherri. He put on the workplace smile. “Sherri,” he said. “So strange to see you here.”
She put one hand on t
he rear end of his cart. She laughed. “For a second there, I thought you were following me,” she said.
“Can’t be too careful at night,” he said.
“No, you can’t,” she said. “So many weirdos.”
“Yes, yes,” he said.
She leaned over the cart. She tapped the inside of it twice and her ring clanked against it. “I’ve got your number, buddy,” she said. “I’m keeping my eye on you.”
Then she turned away from him and pushed her cart toward the front of the store, where lived the lottery machines, the darkened hair salon, the Icee dispensers. He watched her from here to there, the thick of her legs, the swing of her behind. Then he bought some crackers and took them home to his wife. All the way home he drove with the windows down and breathed in the meleleuca and the orange blossoms. For the first time, he could foresee a future here.
Getting Messed Up
By Randy Rohn
I’d never seen so many flashing lights in my life. Red and blue shards, cutting through my brain. I could feel them slicing through gray matter.
I wanted to jump out of the car and run. Of course, I couldn’t, since I was in a Megamart parking lot surrounded by Staties. I thought about closing my eyes. Going to sleep. Of course I couldn’t do that, either, tweaked to the gills the way I was.
Here we go again. Drugs and trouble.
I love drugs. I mean, I really do. Some of my best days have been on drugs. And this, at first, felt like it might be one of those good days. I had that elation. That all-powerful feeling.
Then we had to pull into Megamart.
Drugs have never been my problem. They treat me all right. It’s the stuff associated with drugs that’s been my downfall. Usually they’re female.
That’s what got me into Q. in the first place.
Sell a little this, so you can buy a little that, and the judge frowns. Sell it to a girl you coulda swore was over fourteen and the judge frowns a little more. Doesn’t get all hard core, but you’re gonna do some time. When it’s the second tango, like I’m supposed to check I.D.,the judge hands you a nickel.
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