The Perils of a New Grocery Store

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Stacy liked to fantasize. As she pushed her shopping cart along the grocery store relieved that this aisle didn’t have any bustling shoppers, she let her imagination fly. Instead of scanning the nearly empty shelves, she was a bat, soaring through the sky under the moon. Life would be simpler as a bat she thought as she squinted at the expiration date on the Kine Juice - New with Italian Herbs! it was seven months expired and she gagged slightly while putting the can back on the shelf. Bats snapped insects from the sky without worrying about upset stomachs. Four expired cartons later - and a particularly nasty one that had leaked - she finally settled on three cartons of Chicken Humors - Chortles for the Heart. With a sigh, she rolled her eyes at the marketing gimmick and made a mental note to ask Lewis if he was sure this store was the only sanguine extract carrier in the area. If it was, it looked like she was going to have to order off Amazon and dish out the insane shipping prices. Bats never worried about shipping.

 
She turned her cart back towards the entrance and grimaced. The stares and whispers and hurried scattering was the worst part of any shopping trip. Nobody liked bats either, but a bat wouldn’t know that everyone hated them simply for existing. Being a vampire, well, she was all too aware of the fear she inspired even though most of the things people believed about vampires weren’t even true. Exiting the Larder for Lorefolk aisle, she tried to ignore the elf mother that promptly shepherded her children down the Meats, Mussels, & Marrow aisle, despite the fact that elves couldn’t digest meat. Stacy gritted her teeth and kept going. Who in their right mind - vampire or not - would bother attacking someone in a grocery store with plenty of witnesses and security cameras?

The human cashier stiffened when she rolled into his lane and kept casting furtive looks at her. Probably thought she could smell fear. She couldn’t, but she didn’t need to; his body language said it all. She could smell that he was anemic, but no one ever wanted to hear that from a vampire, so much so that most states had a law prohibiting vampires from discussing medical information with anyone without a medical license and signed consent from the patient. This suited Stacy just fine. She preferred keeping conversations with strangers to a minimum. Bats she was sure, never had to navigate awkward social niceties. It was a relief to step outside the grocery store at last and take her cartons of chicken blood to the car. At least in her second-hand sedan she was just another driver, not a legendary monster. 

***

Not really sure where Stacy is or why she’s there, but I had fun making up a vampire shopping trip. I figured that a vampire blood supplier would want to use less obvious terms other than blood to describe their products, hence the “Kine Juice” and “Chicken Humors,” and calling blood “sanguine extract” for general use. “Kine” is a biblical word for cattle, and “humors” is referring to the four humors in medieval medicine, which included blood. “Sanguine” is a blood red color.  I had a lot of fun with the products and aisle names, and maybe someday I’ll get around to actually creating a story for Stacy to inhabit.