Exotic Fruits

Bethany spent Monday morning in her pajamas. She spent it under a blanket, unshowered and drinking tea while watching Twilight Zone episodes for the millionth time. The weather was clear outside her apartment window, but cold. A firm and unyielding reason to not move anywhere but the couch and the kitchen the entire day. 

But as it happened, Bethany would be unable to spend the remainder of that day participating in that particular event. The primary reason being the call she received around 11:45. 

“Beth?” a lilting voice on the phone. 

“Hey Nana, what’s up?”

“Beth? It’s Nana, I ran out of milk and little snickers bars, can you take me to the shop?” Her little voice was permanently adorable, and honestly she was just a super nice lady even without the whole Nana thing to go with it. 

“I can just stop by the grocery on the way to your house, is that okay? We can have a cup of tea,” she sipped from her existing cup of tea as she waited the lag time to see if Nana had heard her. 

“Oh I don’t mean to be a bother, honey, I can come with you,” she said. She seemed unaware that a trip across town to pick her up to return halfway across town to the nearest grocery would mean significantly more time in the car. It would also mean significantly more helping her grandmother with her purse and getting ready and getting into the car and getting into the grocery and back again. 

“It’s fine, I’ll be there in a bit,” Bethany said with a smile in her voice. 

After hanging up, she sat on the couch for a moment while Henry broke his glasses on the tv. Time Enough at Last, one of her favorite episodes. She finally sighed  heavily and hauled  herself up to go get dressed. 

She put on a pair of leggings underneath a pair of baggy sweatpants and tossed a sweatshirt over her pajama top. She was far too lazy today to bother impressing the grocery store people and far too cold-blooded to mind wearing multiple layers against the light frozen breeze that accompanied the winter outdoors situation. 

A few minutes of driving later, she arrived at Stew’s Foodmart, the town’s only grocery store. The parking lot was very nearly empty, it being the middle of the day on a monday. So, she parked as near to the front door as she could and scurried inside as quickly as she could, hunched against the cold wind. 

The grocery store was completely empty of people. The doors yawned open for her as she walked up to them and the normal grocery store sounds greeted her. The humming sounds from various refrigeration units, the amorphous muzak that has ever held sway in every grocery store, the heating units throughout the store were all in full-swing. No sound of the checkout counters beeping customers, though. 

But then, it was a Monday in the middle of the day. She picked up a basket and lingered under the blaring heat fans immediately over the entrance for just a moment and ventured into the bright fluorescent food palace. 

She struck out into the bowels of the store, past the bread on her left, past the lemons, limes, oranges, and grapefruit. Just past the broccoli, cauliflower, and brussel sprouts on her right. 

She then stopped mid-stride when she noticed a large crate of what appeared to be fluffy black balls. She looked below the rack for any sort of price tag that might tell her the identity of these mysterious fruits. When she saw none, she started to think they were some sort of toy like you see on end-caps all the time. She took a few steps toward them and picked one up. 

The fluff was not nearly as soft as it appeared, the ball sat on her hand like it was a sea urchin or something, making her skin prickle unpleasantly as she held it. She dropped it quickly, that blind, lizard brain reaction overcoming all other thoughts. The ball didn’t bounce when it landed with its brothers in the crate.

Unsettled by the odd reaction, she took a step back and walked around the display, finally finding a tag that had fallen to the ground, which she picked up and saw advertising $1.99 Avocados.

There was a series of sounds that she almost took for someone’s cart squeaking or something on the bleary music over the loudspeakers. But it was, in fact, a series of clicking sounds. She lifted her eyes back to the crate to see that instead of fluffy black balls, it was now a crate of avocados, all very nearly overripe. 

She frowned at it and walked back to the avocados, reaching out tentatively and picking one up. Its cool wrinkled skin was anything but fluffy or spiky or whatever she had thought was in the crate had felt like. She set it back down where she’d found it and stared at it for a few moments. 

She walked backwards away from it, brow furrowed and frown locked firmly in place. She finally turned and walked back toward the deli, watching the avocados disappear around the display of tortillas. Once they were gone, she looked ahead, remembering her original mission in the store: milk and little snickers. 

The milk she knew Nana exclusively used for her tea, so, per usual, she grabbed the smallest container they had at the time. Occasionally she found a pint when doing little trips for her, but usually it was a quart.  About a third of it went bad fairly regularly, generally when Beth wasn’t paying enough attention to the stupid little expiration date. The little snickers on the other hand were a good chunk of where her grandmother got her ‘nutrition’ from. Happily they included peanuts, which was… basically a vegetable, by anyone’s guess, but the chocolate, nougat, and caramel were less than ideal for an aging body’s ability to keep from getting older and in worse health. Beth knew last time her dad had brought Nana to  get her physical they had had to put her on a drip for a while because she was malnourished, to which Nana had responded with a statement on how she had earned her right to eat how she wanted, “This isn’t  Nazi Germany, after all!” 

Beth had found herself in front of the dry foods section, mindlessly staring at the wide variance in instant noodles available to her, in spite of her absolute lack of present need for them. Her favorite was shrimp, but she kept that hush-hush in public.

The grocery’s general lack of human sounds was like something out of a zombie movie before an attack, but Beth, being Beth, was basking in it. She somehow always came to the grocery on a weekend when everyone and their mother was there. Screaming kids, inconsiderate older folks, the incessant beep pause beep of the registers in the background… It was all fairly stressful. The food was the saving grace in all this; after all, if not for the glory of the grocery store’s massive variance in fruits, veggies, canned things and the myriad of unexplored snacks, it would be a pretty intolerable place. But now she only got to enjoy the good parts of the experience. No one was here, she could take her time, not say ‘excuse me’ with a lame smile every time she had to squeeze by someone in an aisle, she could just get her groceries and take her time with it.

Nana was likely watching her stories on the TV anyway, a few extra minutes was not going to make much difference, least of all if Beth could scrounge something up substantial she could cook so her grandmother could eat a proper meal for once. 

She was standing in the canned soup aisle when she heard clicks again. She looked down the aisle, toward the deli and bakery section at the back of the store and there was a single fluffy black ball sat positioned in the middle of the aisle right at the end, squarely between the chips endcap and the tiny section of kitchen utensils and pans. 

She froze, hand halfway to returning a can of cheese soup to its position amongst its fellows. 

There was a quiet pause between songs in the loudspeaker and another series of clicking sounds, and two fluffy black balls with long, spindly spider-like legs clattered across the speckled white linoleum to rest behind the existing ball in a V-formation, stowing their legs. 

She didn’t move for a long moment, mind still deciding between fight or flight.

Flight won out.

She dropped the basket and can and sprinted with all her might toward the exit. Whatever was happening here, she knew she wanted no part of. Whether it was some easily explainable new weird animal she’d never heard of or actually some strange supernatural phenomenon she had never heard of, she knew full well it was a poor sign. And thus she ran. She was only about 30 yards from the entrance at a straight line, even with the aisles and such she knew it couldn’t be more than 50. She heard clicking behind her and as she rounded the corner, she saw another black ball, also making its way toward the door, like it was racing her but had a good 10 yards on her to the finish line. 

She sprinted nonetheless, she’d done track and field during high school, she could beat a weird urchin spider thing to a door. 

She was wrong. 

She turned to begin the 20 foot trek to the door and saw the ball stop at the bottom of the entrance. It swelled to an unbelievable size, opened a yawning, massive mouth, and swallowed the door. It was gone, sliding glass windows, fixed windows, heating unit buzzing over the top of it, all gone. Where it had been was now just a continuation of the pale yellow concrete blocks that made up the rest of the walls. The light that had been pouring in just a moment before disappeared, the store now was exclusively lit by the fluorescents overhead.

 The thing returned to its normal size and tucked its legs away, maintaining firmly that it was inanimate and that there had never been a door here at all. Ever.

She stopped, half bent over, keeping herself from collapsing by slamming her hand into a display of chips and breathed hard, not taking her eyes off the bizarre thing on the floor. 

After long moments of hearing nothing and never seeing the ball move even the slightest bit, she looked to her right down the line of cash registers. She saw no one, the one register at the far end had its ‘available’ light on, but no one present. No one was at the customer service cut-out against the front wall, not a soul seemed to be in the store at all. She noticed that the music had stopped. The hum of the heaters was gone. 

Her eyes swung back to where the ball had been, and found nothing but waxed floors and a sound of chittering that she was very nearly sure was not all in her own head. She turned and began a desperate sprint for the kitchen utensil section in search of a weapon. She skidded and stumbled as she came around the corner charging for where she knew there was a small bank of kitchen knives. At the end of the aisle in which she had, moments ago, been simply choosing a canned meal to share with Nana, was a massive, roiling shape.

The legged, spiked balls rolled over one another like thousands of newly hatched spiders. The chittering was cacophonous. The fluorescent light from above was soon obscured by the mass as it grew and surged forward. 

She took three stumbling, panicked steps away from it, toward the cash registers, when she felt the first prickles against her back.