The Grocery Store

Had to write this for my creative writing class. The assignment was to imitate the style of Mary Ruefle. There is a lot I don't like about it but we get to revise all of our pieces and turn them in again at a later date to share. I figured I would share this.

It is a Sunday morning and like all Sunday mornings it is when the grocery shopping must be done. If it were done on any other day, it would feel like a crime against nature. Yet, here I am at the grocery store at 11:30 like always walking with my cart to the front doors when I see a young teenage girl in a small plaid skirt, the kind you might imagine a school girl wearing, and here she is looking as though she might melt into a puddle, her face red, eyes a crazed and mottled shade of blue. I wonder why she is crying, and I observe her looking into the reflection of the glass windows, staring at legs, her thighs touch and I imagine that THIS must be what she is crying about because what else would a teenage girl have to cry about besides unrequited love? The obsessions that, we as humans, have with the female figure, the body almost seems separate from the mind, two distinct entities: one to satisfy others sexually, the other to remind you to not forget the milk at the grocery store. This same body that is whistled, hooted, and honked at, A body that is forever poked, prodded, and weighed like a laboratory rat, constantly at wrong for eating too much, eating too little, a million details that all point to this solitary girl in her plaid skirt on this rainy Sunday morning and says: Destroy yourself. I realized that I was witnessing this very girl, her finger hovering above her own self-destruct button, weighing the pros and cons of that decision; but who cares about pros and cons because the mind wants what the mind wants and nobody ever DARES ask the body what IT wants, but in the end, the body wins and you shut up and eat your damn Cheerios.