Lost at Target

Lost in the grocery store. I’m fourteen years old and I’ve misplaced my mother. I ask one of the grocery workers if I’m walking in the direction of the front, and he says “the front is relative” and blows purple dust off his palm at my face. I wake up in the home and garden section.

I tried all four sides of the store. I try again. I find a fifth side. And a sixth side. All of the sides are different.

I keep walking. I grab tomatoes and salamis from the grocery to sustain myself. A worker says “I’m going to call the police!” But the police never come. I want them to come. I ask for help again. The grocery store man blows dust in my face. I wake up in the home and garden section.

Walking. Stealing. Bathrooms. I have been trapped for hundreds of years wandering the halls, replacing my clothes with fresh clothes.

“Alright, haha, just don’t leave the store with it”.

I grow out of the children’s sections. I have plundered many Thanksgivings worth of turkeys. I don’t know how many.

I steal Nintendos and books for comfort. Some of them are nonfictional. I read all about the happenings of a world I no longer seem to inhabit. I panic. I scream for help. The grocery man blows dust at my face. I wake up in the home and garden section.

I see him again. I ask for a manager. The grocery man is surprised. I blink and the manager is next to him.

“I have been trapped here for many years, I want to be free. I want mother.”

The manager smacks the employee’s back with disappointment. He looks in my eyes. “I shall set you free.”

Everything goes white. I see the sun for the first time in many years. The grass, the trees. I am in the parking lot. I lay my decrepit, ancient body on the ground, and wait to die.

“There you are!” Mother says. She lifts my bedraggled, wrinkled, shaking, corpulent, useless corpse and tosses it into the back seat of her minivan.