Horace Afoot by Frederick Reuss

running-shoe-shod feet, her head swinging side to side like a tiller as she selects among brand names, a wad of clipped coupons in her fist. She stops and backs her cart up slightly, blocking the aisle. I turn and walk back the other way.
    There is a steady flow up and down each aisle. I try to adjust myself to the pace but am unable to get it right. It seems timed; people sweeping along to Muzak down aisle after sterile aisle of colorful packaging and stock display. As I dart up and down I imagine the infrared God’s-eye view of this neon-lit parade of hungry organisms.
    At last I find the rice. I can choose between boxes or plastic bags or boiling pouches or premeasured, EZ-Pour containers. I heft one ten pound bag of white and one ten pound bag of brown. Twenty pounds should keep me away from here for the next month.
    “You can buy bulk out at the co-op,” a voice from behind me intones.
    I turn. It’s the librarian, Mohr, looking pale and splotchy under his wig and behind his thick horn-rims.
    “Horatius Quintus Flaccus, I presume.” He smiles, a strange clacking at the corners of his mouth, and extends a hand.
    “Mr. Mohr. Hello.” I grasp his hand lightly, a weak articulation of bones, and almost ask what he is doing here. It is hard to believe that he actually eats.
    “The prices are more reasonable at the co-op.”
    I hold the basket with both hands, bounce it lightly against my knees. “A co-op?”
    Mohr nods. “I buy everything I can there. Come here only out of absolute necessity.”
    I look at the contents rolling around in his basket. It is an effort for him to push the metal cart around. His breathing is audible.
    He is still talking. “Out of town a way, about ten miles north on 47. It’s in a barn that used to be part of a dairy. It’s really very handy.”
    “Not for me, I’m afraid. I don’t have a car.”
    “Oh. Well, yes. Then it is too far.”
    We stand there for a moment. Mohr seems unsure what to say next. He is looking into my basket. “How do you manage all of that?”
    “I carry it in my pack.” I turn slightly so he can see it hanging empty on my back.
    “You can carry it all on your back?”
    I nod.
    “I see,” he says, gripping the handle of his cart as if he needs it to holdhim up. With the wig slightly askew on his head, he looks like something that came to life under a Christmas tree sometime during the last century. I shift my basket into my left hand and step around him. He moves the cart slightly to accommodate me, looking at my basket as though he were trying to imagine lifting it himself.
    “See you at the library.” I continue down the aisle.
    As I reach the end of it, the fat woman rounds the corner and swings her cart into me. We face off for a startled moment, a tinge of red twisting into her round Dutch-boy face. Instead of backing away so I can pass, the woman tries to maneuver around me, pinning me between a pillar and the row of shelves.
    “Back up,” I tell her, but she ignores me, suety little arms struggling with the mountain of food.
    “Back up,” I repeat.
    She lets out little puffs of air. “I’m trying!” The child riding in the cart has twisted around to look, a purple fruit bar jammed into its mouth. The woman gives the cart a mighty tug and pulls it backward, but she can’t contain the momentum and it swerves into a display, bringing down an avalanche of cereal boxes. The child lets out a yelp. The woman’s face becomes a panicked red. “I have a child here,” she manages to splutter with indignation. “I have a child with me.” I slide around her cart and step over the pile of boxes. “Do you understand? A child!”
    I don’t have the slightest idea what she means. She says it as though I have violated some subtle supermarket etiquette that gives her the right of way.
    “A child. Do you understand?” She seems to want me to respond. I can’t imagine what it is she is trying to tell me, so I turn and heft my basket for her to