Herein Thisplace

Dedicated to those who like to wander through suburban supermarkets just to see what's on their shelves and what you can conjecture about those who regularly visit them. There's nothing like a dim, well-air-conditioned grocery store to thrust you back upon the memories of childhood errands or to send a chill down your spine as items that should be absolutely, mundanely familiar just aren't in that expected aisle or spot.

It takes navigation to make it to the concrete across the warm black lot, bright lights and random cars sliding down the lanes. Can’t watch the sunset and the drowsy grackles fruiting from super-model-sized oak trees that could fit on a porch or the vestibule of one of those suburban houses just beyond the city proper. Maybe some are left deep in the byways of the city itself, old neighborhoods whose names are bywords and conjurations. But this is Houston, and the thing you should really think of is a spacecraft lying on its side or pointing a needle tip toward that blue sky.

You’d need a needle tip to pierce this air, even now, in the season of pumpkin walls making an autumnal fortification at the airlock doors that open onto a vestibule that could hold a dozen of those parking lot trees and then opens again into crammed aisles of produce and one set of double doors that releases you into the main body of the grocery store, away from vegetable flesh and leaf.

Follow the rows around, past candles and jams and pasta, along the wall of freezer cabinets, to the egress to the bakery section, the cheeses, and the deli, all the way back toward the front and another set of doors and the little jog of a hallway that gives onto the concrete stairs up to the demonstration kitchen and the upstairs balcony and the upstairs patio. Time enough for a glass of iced mocha while a family straps their baby into a grey vinyl capsule, all straps and Velcro and sturdy plastic latches. By the bright light of industrial lights and sunlight from the high row of warehouse windows (almost pre-shattered in their humid jewelry), they secure the baby tight against the dad, tiny body curled face to chest, just like the illustrations of every baby voyaging to life. Dad module shivers, shifts and begins his progress to the stairs while his wife handles the remnants of their brief visit.

Voyagers away, it’s just the concrete and the evening light, still almost afternoon-brilliant, gleaming from the concrete floors below.

Gleaming from the wafers and wine.

Lanky striders lean into the stop and start gait of wire baskets, dazed by the dark shelves barely taller than head-height, tall enough, and by the bright freezer doors. Dark jackets wander among them, as much the precise arbiters of price and space and serving as they might be the votaries of the food. And, perhaps, the only ones for whom the confessions of abundance and place and class and a numinous sense of doing the thing that must be done have been heard to the edge of sense. For what can you find at their side, who know the back of the house, the front of the house, the warehouse proper? They can parse the bottles and cans.

Fairies could bend in the light outside of those clerestory windows above, refracted angels whose hover is made of gnat and humidity, barefoot at the ledge of the windows. They laugh to themselves, a rumble of pipe and airplane, vibrating overhead. They remember likewise, bent, so the light strikes a memory and it breaks into a story of thread upon color upon emotion swerving into their fellows, the stories we tell of them, of their mounds and castles and feasts. And they continue to laugh.

In the insect glimmer of the swarming evening, they tell each other of plastic glitter heat-pressed onto t-shirts, of something wondrous that calls to our toes as they stretch beyond the plastic and rubber of our sandals, of children swimming through the errands, knees kicking in the front of the carts, flung in the swing of what they see above and around.

Tar pebbles and leaves press against the soles of their feet, still here, still at home, even with nothing royal to exalt them except the vision of this store, gleaming and moving like a filmstrip below them. A smell is enough, a bird curving over the parking lot, all the things that are at home in the whole in the where-nothing-is-seen that we breathe every second of every day, in the place we consign to dreams and draughts.

Glass breaks on a note you hear like a new connection between the neurons in your brain, nerves racing your ear and skin as a window shears into drops, melts in sound, falls and freezes into rainy chandeliers around the rim of one of those industrial lights. Something has shorted or leaked. Everyone pauses for the dimming of the lights. Everyone misses the creatures who land barefoot on the dusty tops of the freezer cabinets, who jump over the canvas bags printed with the store’s name, and land beneath the light full of shards of their passage.

None of the lights dim.

They stand there barefoot, holding hands. A voice rises along the rainbow dust coiling like smoke above them. “We can walk it. Even here, in this place, there is the path to wisdom.” You glance around the maze of shelves and wonder.

Eventually, evening evaporates and the windows become night-blind. The store is sealed, light reflecting itself, reflecting everyone back into the glimmering concrete, back onto the shoulders of the wine bottles, into the aluminum counters and the edges of the freezer doors. A labyrinth in a fun house.

Beneath the upper balcony, a couple approaches the checkout. Their cart is sparse, eyes blank, shuffling forward. There is wildness evaporating from them in the lights, like a bright plastic label peeling from them. Organic. Sustainably harvested. Fair trade. Words bubble up like hot plastic, sealing the tar dust and the gnat glitter.

It’s time to grab whatever remains and leave the great supermarket that gleams up at you, lights brilliant as teeth shimmering in the concrete. There are straps to wrap about waists and shoulders, there are things to seal against the outside.