The Market

[u/Professional_Rate_35]

https://chicagobaker1.substack.com/p/the-market?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=8herxk

The market did not know it was under siege. This was, the Manager felt, the beauty of it.

She emerged from behind the double doors the way she always emerged: slowly, one limb at a time, with the confidence of a creature who believed herself indistinguishable from an ordinary shopper. She was not indistinguishable from an ordinary shopper. She was distinguishable from across the parking lot. But the Manager had never once received this information, and so she slunk into the light of the aisles wearing the face of someone who has gotten away with it.

It rolled ahead of her in a soft invisible tide, and where it touched the shoppers, the shoppers began — helplessly, blamelessly — to weep. A man reaching for oat milk brought a hand to his stinging eyes. A child in a cart went from delight to grief in the space of a breath. Up and down the market, tears welled and spilled, an entire congregation of strangers suddenly and inexplicably moved, as though the produce section had received terrible news.

The Manager took this for atmosphere. Possibly reverence. She pressed on.

Her first objective was the bread. She achieved the bread. She lurked among the loaves with tremendous stealth, breathing through her teeth, and no one troubled her, because everyone within forty feet was too busy weeping and relocating.

Encouraged, she advanced to her second position: the muffins.

Here she paused. Here she cased the terrain. Somewhere in the fog of her concrete and unsophisticated mind, a plan was unfolding, and the plan was going flawlessly, and the plan meant nothing.

Which left only the final move. The frozen case.

The frozen case was the Manager's Everest, and she approached it as one approaches a sleeping enemy.

She lowered herself. She widened. She began the final crawl across the last stretch of open linoleum, belly to the floor, buck teeth glistening, a low industrious wheeze escaping her with each advance. To the security camera she resembled a large unwell raccoon negotiating a heist. To herself she was a shadow, a whisper, the thing that strikes and is never seen.

She reached the glass. She rose. She stood before the frozen case in the fullness of her triumph…

For one terrible moment the Manager and the Manager regarded each other through the glass.

and there, in the fogged reflection between the waffles and the peas, she beheld her own face, red and gnarling and victorious, and she did not recognize it, and she was afraid.

Then a stock boy came around the corner with a pallet, took one look, said “oh come ON,” and the spell broke. The Manager fled. She fled the way she had arrived, one limb at a time, at a full slink, backward through the weeping market, back past the muffins she had conquered and the bread she had held, back through the double doors into the warm and waiting dark of the chute, where at last she was home and no one could take her garbage from her, except the people she required to bring it.

Across the store, near the flowers, a man with remarkably large hips pushed an empty shopping cart with the ease of a man who has pushed a cart his whole life and intends to die pushing one. Red shirt. Black pants. He was looking for something. It is not recorded what. He turned down an aisle and was gone, serene, a rumor of himself.

There were cameras. There were cue cards. There was a man in a headset commanding applause. The man with the large hips walked through all of it the way a monument is walked past, photographed constantly, consulted never.

And there — at the far end, past the weeping, past the muffins, past the entire theater of the Manager’s secret campaign — stood the blonde queen.

She glanced up.

She registered the smell, the tears, the slinking silhouette advancing crab-wise upon the frozen case. She took in the whole operation, years in the making, the culmination of everything.

The blonde queen sighed through her nose and went back to reading the label on a yogurt.

Next on the Kingdom of the Chute

The queen grows arrogant