Short fiction on the common gull

I was a seabird, I had a fling with a grocery store clerk. The first time I visited I bought an action figure and some grapes, I only did it because I wanted a discount on oranges. He liked my beak and the fish I caught, didn’t like the way I talked. He followed me around like a dog, I ate things out of the trash a lot. The grocery store was very bright and beautiful, the aisles very clean and straight, I hadn't really seen something so holy before. The whole thing, in my mind, was like a grid of gleaming thread, pulled taught in 90° angles. I only did it because I thought I was at church. Merriam-Webster told me that the word gull originates from the Welsh "gwylan", that it means "to deceive", that I am therefore a deceitful creature. Maybe I just like listening to the radio in strangers' cars and watching lots of tv. 

The clerk was pretty boring, now that I really think about it; his shoes were terrible and dirty, they looked like rotten mussels clamped onto his feet. Mussels tend to be like that, brave and stubbornly resigned to idiocy. The tide pools teem with this sort of personality, such resilient organisms are no good at chess or watching movies. The suburbs around the grocery store were similar, but the beasts that resided there had no need for survival instinct or knowledge of the tides, they placated themselves with sports and large vehicles. Despite all these relative comforts, they still couldn't find the time to actually be good at anything, besides maybe grilling and walking the dog. 

He really liked strawberry milk, the clerk, the kind in the yellow bottles in the back fridge, pulled from the teet of a mutated bovine. He'd sit in the parking lot and clutch the bottle, nursing like a terrified infant, I found him repulsive and endearing. 

The grocery store had wonderful grocery carts affixed with little flags. I would watch the flags stumble down the aisles, small armies of unhappy fathers and depressed college kids jockeying for cereal and pasta sauce. The speakers leaked electronic and folk music, dribble curated for the self-loathing individual who frequented a store like this; the employees were allowed to play one song a day (this was a grave managerial mistake). My favorite person was this woman in the deli department, she would use the huge whirring blade to slice hocks of ham, she seemed to be quite skilled at this. The song she selected was Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, fitting given her profession. The clerk told me this woman has won the county pie-eating contest 4 years in a row, that her favorite pie is coconut cream pie, and that she is unhappily married to a bank teller. I frequently wondered why she wasn't the mayor. 

Most of what I learned about the employees and customers was in little lists like this: the lady who collected the carts in the parking lot only wore green underwear, the old man who arrived early every Tuesday morning and waited for the store to open did so because he wanted the "freshest muffins", the delivery truck driver would sing Ave Maria in a beautiful operatic tenor if you asked politely. Sometimes a baby, bored out of her mind in the shopping cart baby seat, would hoist herself out of the metal enclosure and into the stand of tomatoes, piled high beside the cart. This happened enough that the store's owners employed a tomato security guard, a balding man in a black polyester cop outfit who stood dutifully, for 8 hours a day, beside the glittering display. He seemed to me like what I had heard about god; he was hell-bent on protecting the red fruit from harm, and offered constant unsolicited advice about which tomato the passing customer should purchase. He told my clerk that he looked like "the type of fella who should only be eating beefsteaks." The clerk took this to mean he should adopt a carnivorous diet, which is how I ended up in the back of his car guarding a bag of nearly spoiled pork chops. A little red puddle was starting to form at the bottom of the brown grocery bag that held the meat, which didn't concern me, but definitely would have bothered the clerk. In general, the summer was like the red puddle of pork chop juice, stinking and commonplace, a period of time that didn't really concern me. I took a lot of photos and wrote a lot of things down, I stared at the wall almost endlessly. The grocery store offered silent company. The pork puddle stained the car seat, the clerk got fired for picking his nose, never spoke to me again.