Kmart, 1998

Mama says first things first grab a cart
so my brothers Brian and Aaron get a shopping cart.
It has rickety wheels but that's okay;
mama says we all get rickety sometimes and
it doesn't make us any less useful.

A wonderland of
all the bullshit you could dream of
where the bathroom
is in the back corner of the store,
seemingly abandoned, down an aisle
of ceiling fans going full speed.
Brian whispers hope the fans don't
spin off the ceiling and kill you when
I ask if I can go to the bathroom.

I run down the fan aisle and
in a few minutes, run
right back out. I'll live another day.
I survived the whirring blades.

We beg and beg and beg for
an Icee from the snack counter up front.
Mama says y’all can split one
between the three of you. That’s
plenty.

We argue about which
flavor to get. Coke, I say.
No, cherry, says Aaron.
BLUE! BLUE! Brian shouts
louder than me and Aaron.
He wins. We get blue.

We pass the cup around and
suck it down so quickly that we
all end up with brain freezes,
but we don’t care.

Eventually mama’s cart is full
so we go to check out. We load
the groceries into the car and
watch the store disappear
behind us.

Rachel Tanner is an Alabamian writer whose work has recently appeared in Impossible Task,The Weekly Degree, Tiny Molecules, and elsewhere. She tweets @rickit and more of her work can be found at https://neutralspaces.co/racheltanner.