THE GROCERY STORE PT. 2

This is continued from HERE.

Enjoy!


It had been a difficult morning, preceded, as usual, by a night of insomnia that left her shattered and groggy by six, when the alarm went off. The internal battle to shut off the snooze, drag herself out of the blankets, and propel herself out of the bedroom, down the hall, and into the kitchen was made more difficult by the fact that she'd drunk a bottle of bad white wine the night before; the rebelliousness that had pushed her to do that had now mutated into a simmering anxiety about her drinking, among other things--into worries, intensified by a stabbing headache and dry, dirty taste in her mouth, that were difficult to ignore.

She made it to the coffee maker and turned it on, her mood briefly brightening with the comforting sounds of the machine and the smell of the coffee; for a moment, she leaned against the counter and rested her head in her hands, resolving, once again, to approach the day with a new, dynamic, positive perspective.

The sound of the baby crying drew her out of the beginnings of a dream, the insomnia finally having given way to dark curtains falling, falling, falling mercifully around her, and she jerked up and looked at the clock on the stove: it was 6:45. Late.

The coffee hadn't finished brewing but she grabbed the carafe and poured it into a cup sitting by the sink, then shook a hefty amount of artificial creamer in the cup and stirred it, hastily, with a fork. The house was rarely tidy by nighttime and it wasn't unusual for the morning to play out like this--a mad scramble for spoons, razors, and matching socks, a kind of real-life board game with real-life setbacks that, for some reason, never sank in.

Lifting the cup to her lips, she walked as fast as she could to the bedroom yelling "Hon! Hon! You're going to be late!" and then shook, with her free hand, the lumpy shape of her sleeping husband.

"Hon! Get up!" she said again, and gave him one more urgent push, then lurched away towards the baby's room. The movement--the turning, especially--prompted a fresh series of piercing jabs in her head, and she instinctively raised her hand to press it against the pain, but in her foggy state forgot about the cup she was holding; in a slow, dreamlike arc, the contents sloshed out and landed in a milky brown puddle around her.

"Goddammit! Fuck!" she said. The hangover and agitation were rising, a flood threatening to spill over, and as she opened the baby's door the smell of shit hit her and it was too much. The smell was too much, everything was too much, and as she reeled and fell to the floor the flood waters surged. Suddenly relieved, almost...happy, she opened her mouth and released a giant wave of white wine and coffee and another thing, a profound, unidentified thing, all over the legos and clothes littering the pink fluffy rug.