Fish Food

Ruthie and I had spent more hours than we could count collecting shells and starfish and driftwood, sometimes we would find an old coin tangled in the kelp but until the tide carried in the severed hand, our adventures had been harmless and mostly uneventful. The hand changed everything.

Ruthie saw it first and let out a high pitched scream, scaring me out of a year’s growth and making me drop my entire lapful of sea glass. It was ragged at the wrist, shriveled and badly discolored, missing two fingers and the joint of the thumb. When Ruthie poked it with a stick, I gagged and thought for a moment that I would lose my lunch.

“Leave it alone!” I wailed desperately.

“Jeesum crow,” she whispered, “Somebody’s fish food!” She leaned in a little closer and prodded it again. My stomach lurched dangerously.

“Let’s just go home,” I pleaded with her but Ruthie was as fascinated as she was stubborn. She managed to separate the vile thing from the kelp with the stick and push it out of the way of the tide.

“What can we put it in?” she asked.

“PUT IT IN?” I screeched and realized I was beginning to feel light headed, “”Put it back in the water! Let the fish finish it!” A feeling very much like panic had begun a slow but steady climb from my gut and I was positive if it reached my throat I would puke or pass out or both but Ruthie was being maddening reasonable.

“No,” she said calmly, “We have to tell somebody. Sparrow or Long John maybe.” She looked thoughtful for a moment and then grinned. “Better yet, we’ll take it to Doc! He’ll know what to do.”

The thought of handling it was the last straw. The bile reached my throat and I suddenly tasted acid indigestion and began dry heaving. I ran blindly for the edge of the woods, fell to my knees and threw up breakfast and lunch and everything in between. It was humiliating and awful but Ruthie helped me up, had me rinse my mouth with a handful of salt water, then gave me a cherry lifesaver and a reassuring hug.

“We can wrap it in kelp and put the kelp in the sandwich box,” she said practically, “Don’t worry, you won’t have to touch it.”

So that’s what we did. She tied her bandana to the stick and then the sandwich box to the bandana and we set off. I kept well away from the wretched thing but Ruthie just slung the stick over one shoulder and began to whistle. Headed down the well worn path from the cove to the road, I imagined we looked all the world like a couple of Norman Rockwell kids off on a fishing trip.

We found Doc comfortably settled in a rocking chair on his porch, smoking his pipe, frowning over a crossword puzzle and drinking buttermilk. The old gray tomcat who had kept company with every doctor we’d ever had was asleep at his feet and Miz Flora was in the kitchen, frying sausages and potatoes. Without a flicker of disbelief or condescension, Doc listened gravely as Ruthie explained what the tide had carried in. When she was done, he adjusted his spectacles and nodded for her to open the lunchbox.

“Well,” he said neutrally, “Let’s have a look at it.”

Ruthie opened the box, lifting the lid carefully and exposing the hand in a bed of kelp. I more than halfway expected it would begin crawling out on its own accord and was fully prepared to run when Doc reached for it - thought better of it and called for Miz Flora to bring him a pair of gloves, pulled them on and reached again - and laid it on the concrete. Flora went white and let out a gasp and the cat suddenly woke, wrinkled its nose and ran off in a huff. Smart cat, I thought dismally.

Doc frowned and looked closer. “My, my” he said and there was just a touch of surprise in his voice, “That certainly is a hand. How interesting.” He had Ruthie re-tell about how and where we had found it, asked if we’d seen anything else in the way of body parts (that made my gut clench again and I swallowed fiercely hard and prayed not to throw up) and then had Flora fetch a plastic bag and carefully slid it over the thing. “Reckon we’ll let the law have a look,” he told us reassuringly, “You were right to bring it.”

Ruthie flashed me a smug, told-you-so kind of smile and I had a sudden urge to punch her but I was too glad to be rid of the hand to stay mad. Doc took it to the RCMP but we never did find out whose it was or what had happened. Nova Scotia was a maritime province and the Atlantic storms took many an unsuspecting fisherman. It was painful and heartbreaking but not uncommon for a fishing boat to drift home alone and the body never be recovered.

“Comes with the territory,” Sparrow often said, “The ocean, she keeps her secrets.”

Alligators

There are few things more endearing than a tribe of hollering, dirt smeared urchins in ragged clothes descending on an unsuspecting drugstore while their scrawny, scantily clad, chin to ankle tattooed, meth addled mother tries to make sense of her change to pay for her smokeless tobacco. She swats absent mindedly at the children, cursing under her breath and yelling for them to behave. Most are running wild, pulling items off the shelves and chasing each other through the aisles. The one in the stroller begins to wail. Not a single child or their mother is wearing a mask and one older child is busy trying to rip the social distancing markings off the floor. Distracted drugstore staff are trying to pretend none of it is happening while management has done their well practiced disappearing act. It’s chaos at its best.

“Alligators,” I tell the cashier, making no effort to be discreet, “They eat their young.”

“Sound practice,” she tells me and smiles over her mask.

I pay for my cigarettes and make my escape.

Walgreen's Rules

I should have known better.

They have to call for a supervisor to come to the photo desk and as I watch her shuffle her sullen and obese self toward me, I remind myself not to judge a book by its cover. She doesn’t speak, doesn’t smile, doesn’t show any interest. I take a deep breath.

“Hi!” I say brightly, determined to give her the benefit of the doubt, “I need a print made from a negative.”

“Have to send it out.” she says flatly.

“Ok.” I say and try to smile.

“Might take 3-4 weeks,” she adds with a hostile glare.

“Ok.” I say and try harder.

“Maybe longer,” she says defiantly.

I don’t have to have a house fall on me. I slowly take back the negative and put it away, pick up my keys and sling my purse over my shoulder.

“Tell you what,” I say loudly, “Next time you can’t be bothered to help a customer, try saying so upfront. It’ll save you both time and trouble. Go back to your stall and strap on your feedbag.”

The last was harsh and I shouldn’t have said it but I’m done with slovenly, shiftless, rude and indifferent customer service and the troglodytes who provide it without consequences. The girls who cashier for minimum wage at the front of the store are unfailingly polite and pleasant and helpful. They know me and what brand of cigarettes I smoke, which candy I buy and that I’m likely to forget my keys if I’m frazzled. The rules for management are far less civil. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why this is such a hard lesson to learn.

Time Warped

As if life in the time of plague wasn’t challenging enough, the grocery stores have now instituted one way aisles. In this city, it’s all we can do manage one way downtown streets or 4 way stops and they think we can handle (or will obey) red arrows in floor diagrams. Many of the store’s employees and most of the shoppers are mask-less and seem to be wandering aimlessly. Some are outright lost, hypnotized by the barren shelves where the paper goods used to be. I have the feeling I am trapped in some kind of post-apocalyptic underground film, that the very next turn I take could lead straight into a nest of the undead. The other thing I notice is that it’s almost eerily quiet, no piped in elevator music is playing and the only sounds are the stops and starts of the shopping cart wheels. The shelf stockers move slowly and silently, as if in a daze and the cashiers are pale and glassy eyed, moving woodenly and seeming to look straight through me. The automatic doors whoosh open and a bag boy stumbles in, pushing a line of carts and looking bewildered. He doesn’t navigate the turn well and the first cart crashes into a display of bakery goods, sending containers of brownies and eclairs and freshly baked pies in all directions. It’s enough for me. I hand over a hundred dollar bill for $97 worth of groceries, tell the cashier to keep the change and make a run for it, swerving wildly to avoid the wreckage of the collision at the front doors and escaping to the parking lot. I was fully prepared to run right over anyone who got in my way.

Once outside, I came back to myself, feeling silly and ashamed for letting my imagination have its way. The grocery store was just a grocery store, not a scene from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. The shoppers were just tired and quarantine-fatigued consumers, the employees no more than harried and overworked clerks. The bag boy was likely sleep deprived or over confident or had simply not been paying attention. It was, after all, just past 7 am on a Saturday morning in the 10^th week of this crisis. We all should still have been in bed.

I unloaded the groceries and dutifully returned the once again ordinary shopping cart to its corral. The morning was sun was warm and the pavement beneath my feet was reassuringly solid and substantial. I found myself thinking how odd it is that we don’t appreciate normal until it’s gone – I miss the unremarkable pre-virus days, the ordinary routines, the self indulgent complaining and complacency we allowed ourselves. Any distraction, even one born of a runaway imagination fueled by too much Stephen King and too little Walt Whitman is welcome. I had no idea that just a few days later, there would be widespread looting and riots with cities set on fire and the national guard patrolling the streets. Sometimes even my imagination can’t keep up.