Candace Black

For years he lived close enough to smell chicken and bananas rotting in the trash bins, to surprise a cashier on break smoking something suspicious when he walked out the back gate. Did they have an account? He can’t remember. Probably so, for all the milk a large family went through, the last-minute ingredients delivered by a smirking bag boy. He liked to go himself, the parking lot’s radiant heat erased once he got past the sweating glass door, to troll the icy aisles in his slippers. This was before high-end labels took over shelf space, before baloney changed its name to mortadella, before water came in flavors, before fish got flown in from somewhere else.