FOLB Prologue

 

The florescent lights flicker down aisle 13 and they have since Charlie can remember. In a moment of darkness she reaches for the low fat pudding snacks her father takes in his lunch to work, throwing them into her shopping cart. She shoves at the cart with her foot, watching it veer left as one wheel squeaks and whirls out of control. It's a path she watches every Sunday, knowing she can move it with about three kicks untouched before she needs to direct it away from the spaghetti sauce shelves.

 

A shopping list is crumpled in her hand getting sweaty because she never uses it. She's had the 16 items she gets for her family every Sunday memorized for almost a year now. She knows that she'll slip through the 15 items or less line because Lulu the cashier with the red red hair and the two inches of white roots counts the two jugs of 2% milk as one item.

 

Kick. “More than a feeling..,” she mummers along with static cracking, brown speakers playing above her head. Kick. “...Same old song they used to play...” Kick, “I begin dreaming when I see Marianne walk away...” Charlie punches the air to the deep drum beats then snatches the veering cart mere inches from the shelves. She expertly steers around the linoleum corner and into the refrigerated section. She kicks the cart down the isle before turning her back on it to snatch a tub of fake butter, tossing it next to the milk. Back at the cart after two more kicks and a snatch before the cart scratches the frosty glass, Charlie catches a glimpse of her reflection in front of the frozen lasagna. Her jeans wrinkle annoyingly around her calves from being wrapped in a laundry basket with her older brother's torn cargo pants because he still refuses to do laundry for himself, even in college. The pullover sweatshirt belongs to her father because her mother has taken all of Charlie's. The rubber on the soles of her chucks has been chewed through by Steg because he'd already destroyed his squeaky toys. There wasn't really a problem with all this, Charlie realizes as she looks down the stretching florescent isle, it's the fact that it's all so predictable.

 

In the parking lot, Charlie lets Herb the middle aged bag boy push her bags to her Jeep because she knows he'd insist if she refused and he really only does it so he can get her tip. She stops suddenly and turns around to look at the Sunday sun ready to sink into the horizon. The light is dull, enticing the grey fog in. When she turns back toward Herb, he stands staring at her expectantly next to her cart with the four double paper bags under a boring blue not-a-cloud sky.

 

 

 

“I've got to get the f**k out.”

 

Reviews

[Erin]

Nice setup for the novel. I do want to point out, though, that in the first paragraph, you used "isle" to mean "aisle." I'm not sure if it crops up again, but you may want to check.

I think you've done a good job at giving the reader an idea of who Charlie is and how she sees the world -- so fantastic job with that. :]