Three Bad Eggs

They sidled through the hatchery of carcasses and boiled

bounty of plenty, where faceless jars and cans all blurred

into a snail crawl of tedium and blank stares that looked at the

overhead lights like they were thirsting for a mothership or

some golden sun to blast back from eons ago or a dusty voyage

but they kept walking and their pace was like mall cops denied

respect and dates and their pulse quickened.

she was the first to notice his body and he was the first to notice

that nobody else had noticed what was unmistakably clear:

that the deli counter clerk had fallen over gross plastic tubes of

air conditioner absent bologna and sheets of congealing cheese

and the flies had come not for his soul but for the wasted plastic

that was marketed as food.

She started to dart like a fish from being stabbed through the

rippling stream magic mirror and he checked the clerk’s clammy pulse

and the clerk was barely alive or was once dead but crawled back to life.

They started to lose their shinola but realized that fussing to a fevered

scream was about as useful as selling Elvis earrings to Bostonian bankers

or convincing sons of the soil to invest in bitcoin and solar panels

so they carried the poor moaning bastard through aisle 6 right up to 10

and used his ghost like face to batter open the outside door.

They dropped him without grace next to a puddle of piss, checked the poor

bastard’s wallet, raided his pockets and lint fell out like funny cosmic clockwork

to let the detectives on scene have a clue of some sort I guess.

Anyway, they picked up their walk away from marooning the deli clerk who

was 2 days late for his bridge club where he was supposed to get an honor

of some kind and turns out that the deli clerk lived and identified the couple

as the 2 mall cops he had mocked on Saturday night and it was just all a

weird cosmic mind melt that karma grabbed all three by the nuts because

the clerk went to jail for possession and the couple for thievery and all in all

they were the real bad eggs in the grocery store, even worse than that liquid

dog foul they call egg beaters on sale for $3.