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  It Could Be Anyone

  Contents:

  Connect with S.A. Barton

  Midpoint

  By S.A. Barton

  Copyright 2015 S.A. Barton

  The doors of the supermarket slide open, releasing a blast of air-conditioned cool into her face. Ms. Gaither blinks.

  The doors of the supermarket slide open.

  The doors open.

  Open.

  Open.

  Open.

  She stands and waits for all the doors to open; they are all translucent, they emerge from one another and dive beneath each other, visual dolphins in a sea of years. She cannot tell them apart.

  "C'mon, lady," a voice behind her says. It's deep, adult, male, but it carries an impatient whine from childhood. She blinks.

  The doors open. She takes a deep breath and braves the ones that are still closed. She steps, steps, winces, steps. Her head does not rebound from the closed doors, but she slips through like a ghost.

  She hasn't always been so lucky. Last fall, the doors opened but not the door. The OUT OF ORDER sign had been submerged under all of the other doors. She'd been lucky not to need stitches. She'd shrugged off the Manager on Duty and the clerk bringing in the shopping carts and headed back to the bus stop.

  Driving herself was out of the question. Too many cars: the ones that were there, and the ones that were then.

  "A little dizzy today, Ms. Gaither?" an unsuspected voice to her right asks, startling her. The produce clerk, Kathy or Kaitlyn, something like that. A kind young woman who is firm in Ms. Gaither's vision as the doors are not. Kathy or Kaitlyn puts a gentle hand on her wrinkled elbow, ready to support but not pressing the issue. "You should talk to your doctor," Kathy or Kaitlyn says. "You could be diabetic and not even know it. It happened to my aunt. She didn't find out until she passed out at work, right in her chair with some guy from New York City asking about his credit card balance over and over in her ear. They wouldn't even have noticed if they hadn't been monitoring that call. You know, like they say: for quality assurance." Ms. Gaither laughs and leans in to the hand on her elbow a bit, letting herself be led to the bench by the door by the soda pop machine.

  "It's been like this since my stroke, uh? dear," Ms. Gaither says, unwilling to admit she doesn't know Kathy or Kaitlyn's name. She's so nice; it would hurt her feelings. "There's nothing to do but get used to it. It might get better in time," she says. Or it might not. I hope not.

  Ms. Gaither sits down on the bench.

  "Just ask if you need a hand with anything," Kathy or Kaitlyn says. "Any of us will make time for you." The young lady drifts back to her department. Ms. Gaither looks over at the soda pop machine. Maybe something cool to drink...

  The humming electronic monolith fans in her vision like a peacock's tail painted in reds and blues and whites. The sodas are a dollar fifty for a plastic bottle, thirty-five cents for an aluminum can, a dime for a small glass bottle; for a moment the little bottles are solid reality, lined up vertically behind a rectangular glass door, their necks sticking out of their holes like Coca-gophers. You can pry the metal cap off on the bottle opener built into the face of the machine. And then she can see through them, and cans are sixty cents. The coin slot...

  The dollar slot...

  Like the doors, there are too many. Ms. Gaither's hand slides back from where it had hovered just inside the mouth of her purse. Which slot? Which coin? How much?

  She closes her eyes for a moment. Only a moment; too long and they begin to wonder if you've fallen asleep, maybe if you've died. She's old, yes, but it's too much sometimes. Eighty-five is nothing; a woman in France once lived to be a hundred-twenty-and-change. Imagine, forty more years.

  They try to be considerate, thoughtful; they only circle like vultures, waiting. Ms. Gaither opens her eyes and sure enough, the young man behind the counter-trying to grow a mustache, look at him, he'd do better to wait a decade or even five years, it's no time at all-is looking out of the corner of his eye at her, thinking he's not staring if he does it that way.

  "I'm fine, thanks," she says as she turns her head suddenly, making eye contact with a wink. He startles like a teacup poodle.

  "Good to hear," he manages to say from his new station two hops farther away.

  She stands up. The sights of the supermarket, for the moment, remain singular, all, now. She takes a cart, stows her cane inside, glides into the produce section; the cart carries enough of her weight that her hips hardly bother her at all.

  The smells-the apples, the greens, the stacked peaches, half of them bruised not by the trip up from Georgia but from being stacked too tall but pretty-bring on layers of memories of their own, memories of her own, not like the visions at all. A pie thirty years ago before Mr. Gaither died, a peach her mother picked eighty years ago before the Army moved them all up north, Martin fifty years ago turning up his nose at salad, green beans; any vegetable, really. He'd go off to college a few years later and turn into a vegetarian, funny how things go; a few years after that he'd drive out to California for a job interview and a drunk driver would turn him into a corpse-the smell of almonds, stacked in bags under the banana table, brings that memory on. To her, California smells like almonds. She's never been there. Her husband had driven out to bring Martin home to bury.

  And so there were no grandchildren, nobody to need her, Ms. Gaither wandering through the supermarket alone.

  Alone? Nobody?

  "Sir, would you pick me out two or three nice peaches? My hands aren't as steady as they used to be and I wind up bruising the ripe ones," Ms. Gaither says to the person across the display from her. She wheels her cart around to his.

  He looks up from his cart, where he's just put his own bag of peaches. His little girl looks over and then jams her chin into her chest, looking down at her white plastic shoes, suddenly shy.

  "Sure," he says. She's gotten used to the new styles, mostly; the short beard on his chin, the sideburns, the earring aren't as untidy as they'd looked to her when they first came into fashion so many years ago. "Say hello, Chloe," he says to the little girl, taking a new bag off the roll and beginning to palpate peaches thoughtfully. He half-closes his eyes when he feels the fruit, relying on his sense of touch to pick out the good ones. Ms. Gaither smiles. He's a good picker.

  "Hello, Chloe," Ms. Gaither says to the little girl. "It's nice to meet you." Her vision unfolds. The cart hardly changes; carts have hardly changed in thirty years and more. It blurs a bit, that's all.

  But little Chloe flickers in place, here one moment, absent the next, leaving the cart empty; for a split second she's a mutilated Frankensteinian vision, scar closing one eye, cheek stitched, lips swollen, stiff white neck brace with a clear plastic appliance installed in a stoma cut in her throat to let her breath through. Ms. Gaither winces.

  "Hi, lady," one of the Chloes says. Ms. Gaither leans more of her weight on the cart as the little girl visions swim.

  "My name's Dorothy, Chloe," Ms. Gaither says, making her voice as firm and steady as her vision is not. "You're precious. When I had my little boy, when I was young, I had wanted a girl just like you. I was happy to get my little Martin, though. Do you have a baby doll?"

  "Uh-huh, at home. He's a tiger. Daniel."

  "A tiger! Oh, my, how exciting. You take care of your Daniel," Ms. Gaither says, and holds out a hand near the shifting, flickering hands of the Chloes. A few of them touch her hand, briefly. She feels small warm fingers on her old c
ool ones.

  "Three peaches, ma'am. Hope you like them," the Chloes' father says, depositing a neatly knotted plastic bag in her cart. He's not flickering at all. Safe.

  "Thank you so much. You be careful with this one, she's a treasure. We get in a hurry and we forget how precious they are. When my boy was little, seat belts were optional. I remember my husband thinking I was a fool, insisting we pay extra for them. But not a month later they saved my little Martin from a broken neck in an accident. I always checked the belt was on him tight twice, you see," she says to the Chloes' father.

  "Hm, really," he says. His eyes widen a bit and he blinks, deliberately, almost like he's picking out peaches again.

  The Chloes slow down their flickering, slow, slow, stop.

  It's been like this for a while, these visions. And maybe they're only a dark imagination that came out of the stroke. Maybe they're only the hopeful dreams of an eighty-five year old woman who got tired of not being useful to anyone.

  Or maybe they're just what they seem. Maybe now Chloe's father will check the belt on her car seat twice and it will matter.

  "You have a good day, now," the young man says. Dorothy blinks, caught woolgathering.

  "You two have a good day, too. Bye, bye, Chloe," she says. The little girl waves back. She's strong and steady, not flickering at all, safe.

  Dorothy straightens her back and forges deeper into the grocery store, watching.

  It could be anyone who needs her next. It could be anyone.

  It's good to be needed.

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