Author Information
Perennials
I ran into Felix at the supermarket, again. I’m not sure if Felix is his real name, but that’s always how he introduced himself, pointing at his own person with dirty, worn fingers as if I wasn’t aware of his identity, that I needed him to be blatant and obvious, like a child. He wheeled a shopping cart towards me after the pointing and name saying, and I just looked at him. He told me about this botany experiment, mixing vegetable and fruit hormones with perennials. I listened and squeezed a few avocadoes. His words were intangible charts and graphs of carbon emission nonsense and turnover rates and a quasi “Which Tractor Would You Pick?” game show. I was squeezing some plums.
As I pulled into the frozen foods section, I heard Felix’s onslaught of words subside inducing some sort of deafening and almost sickly silence into the supermarket’s atmosphere. It was still for a moment, like most cliché things are, until Felix whooped and wailed with insane fervor catapulting his body on to a large tub-like structure, like a median in the aisle. He was almost crying and shaking two oversized bags of frozen peas and carrots screaming wildly at the other shoppers.
Everyone else seemed so shocked, so afraid, they froze immediately. Freezer doors stood ajar. One man let go of his cart - it careened sideways into some shelves and fell over spilling beets and lettuce and cans of homogenized beans into the aisle. A woman clutched her precious baby. His wailing and defiance raged on, his legs spread across a sea of frozen corn.
I continued shopping.
