Free The Things That Keep Us Here by Carla Buckley

employee wheeling a tall stack of boxes toward her. The dolly nudged the back of her heel. “You the one looking for Merry Berries?”
    “They’re mine!” A short woman with a pixie haircut waved her arm. “I’m the one who asked for them. I’m the one who should get them first.”
    “Libby,” Ann called. “Get me cornflakes.”
    “Got it.”
    The frozen-food section was welcomingly wide. Shoppers stood two abreast. Ann was reckless in her choices, tugging each glass door open and pulling something out. Pizza, toaster waffles, ravioli. She stood with a bag of peas in her hand. No place to put it. She had things wedged in everywhere and piled along the bottom of her cart.
    When she reached the front of the store, she came to a stop at the end of a line that snaked into the aisle. She looked at her cart. It looked foreign to her, someone else’s shopping cart filled with things she would never buy. Marshmallow Fluff, cocktail wienies, diet milkshakes, candy-flavored vitamins. Raisins, though the girls hated them. She dialed her cell phone.
    “Hey,” Libby said.
    Over the phone, Ann heard voices raised in anger. “Everything okay?”
    “A fight over batteries.”
    “Grab as many as you can. I’m in line for register”—Ann peered over the heads in front of her—“twelve.”
    “I’ll be there in a minute. Sit tight.”
    A male clerk slid cases of bottled water onto an endcap. Water. That should have been her first stop. She looked to her cart. It was hopeless. She couldn’t fit in a single bottle.
    The clerk was now heaving cases of water directly into people’s carts. They formed a protective barrier around him.
    “I’m with her,” she heard a familiar voice say, and turned to see Libby push past a skinny woman in a miniskirt. “We’re together,” she informed the man behind Ann. She was breathless, and her cart was just as full as Ann’s. She gripped a twenty-four-pack of toilet paper. Jacob looked as though he was riding a haystack of paper towels, sucking furiously on his pacifier.
    “I forgot water. Watch my cart.” Ann pushed through the people to where the clerk was working.
    “That’s mine,” a woman said.
    “I’ve been here longer,” someone else said.
    The clerk straightened. “Sorry, folks. That’s it.”
    The man in front of Ann said, “You bringing out another load?”
    The clerk shook his head. “The truck comes Sunday.”
    Sunday. Four days away.
    Libby had been watching. “No luck, huh?”
    “I’ll be right back.”
    An empty cart sat in the middle of an aisle, people streaming around it. Ann grabbed the handle and headed to the health food section. It was quieter here. Juices were in a middle aisle. Colorful, bright, unusual flavors, and yes, farther down, a gleaming row of specialty waters.
    In the detergent aisle she grabbed distilled water, big jugs of it that she levered into her cart.
    The neon video store sign glowed in one corner. No one was there, not even a clerk. She worked her way from cold case to cold case, opening the doors and reaching past the sodas for the chilled bottles of water.
    Pushing her cart was hard work now. She gripped the handle with both hands and leaned into it. Without warning, a man stepped in front of her. She came to an abrupt halt, the front of her cart swinging to one side. He grabbed the cart with a hand. He was young and clean-shaven, wearing a football jersey and jeans, and he wasn’t letting go of her cart. He didn’t look crazy.
    “Excuse me,” Ann said, trying to move around him.
    But he had both hands on the wire basket. And she had a firm grip on the handle. They pulled in opposite directions.
    “Let go,” Ann told him. “Are you insane?”
    “Joan!” he yelled.
    This was a deserted part of the store. No one was rushing over here to stock up on video rentals. He was younger and stronger, and he was slowly but surely pulling the handle from her grasp.
    “Joan! C’mere!”
    “Stop that!”
    Thank goodness.