Don't Forget The Lily by Chris Milam

​Don't Forget The Lily

I’m at Wal-Mart because using propane as a daily anti-wrinkle serum has more appeal than simmering pinto beans for three hours. I walk through the produce area squeezing fruit because she said you’re supposed to squeeze fruit. Not too hard, not too soft. It feels improper and clichéd when my hand lingers on the pebbly flesh of a coquettish avocado. It’s only an impostor, but I falter on the inside because it instantly drags me inside that wicked one-word dystopian love poem called Lily. I move on to the canned vegetables, but my mind is still fondling the avocado. Shame floods my head for being on the familiar side of pathetic. And for violating a mutant berry. I reach for the sauerkraut because it doesn’t resemble any of her body parts.

Every aisle is either a memory or confusion. The almond milk is a time machine that takes me back to breakfast and her smoothies. She insisted I eat healthier. I took mental notes when she dropped blackberries, strawberries, mangoes, kiwis and other suspicious, judgemental fruits into a blender. I said maybe we should pulverize a frozen sausage pizza instead. Her semi-legitimate laughter from that moment still lives in my gut, incubating until bedtime, when it will settle behind my rib cage like a blonde virus.

I fall apart in the bread section. Whole grain. Sprouted grain. Honey wheat. Multigrain. 100% wheat. Sandwich thins. A smorgasbord of sliced question marks. I briefly think about texting her for advice, but don’t want to be that guy—the clingy, shattered half-man who sends random unwanted messages about moderately important food decisions. A loaf of white bread lands in my cart. Later, I will get intimate with carbs as an act of defiance and stuff every orifice with milled, bleached flour.

In a smudged, waterless ocean, I snatch bags of frozen salmon because she said it’s all about the good fats. I skip the chip aisle because of trans fats and a future myocardial infarction. Part of me cries, the hollow, polluted part that didn’t care about vitamins, glycemic loads, or longevity before meeting her. Life was simple: cram shit in my mouth, watch tv until legally dead, read junk mail and shampoo bottles on the toilet, sleep like a koala, cram shit in my mouth. Back then, I didn’t catch fish behind glass doors.

I stroll through different departments to eat some clock. She was a candle fan. Standing in front of that section, I stare and inhale and remember scents and flames and arresting silhouettes on taupe walls. I toss dozens of them in the cart. Tonight, my apartment will swell with cinnamon, vanilla, and berrylicious.

But it’s all too much. Every step, every discount bin CD, every royal blue vest is like being waterboarded with gallons of hysteria. I don’t want to be in this scrapbook with fluorescent lights and worn linoleum anymore. I rush through check-out hoping the clerk doesn’t start in about the weather or her ornery grandkids who are such a handful these days.

Putting the bags in the trunk, I glance at the behemoth. All I see is a nuclear winter spelled-out in Hollywood letters towering over the parking lot. I want to run back inside, sit on a lawn chair in the quinoa aisle and trespass forever.

But I don’t.

I drive away with one hand white-knuckling the steering wheel, the other waving like a beauty pageant contestant at her, the empty parking rectangle, the lonely cart wrangler, and the not too hard, not too soft doppelgänger avocado.
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Bio: Chris Milam lives in the past. His stories have appeared in Rabble Lit, (b)OINK, The Airgonaut, Fictive Dream, and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @Blukris

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