UMLÄUT 2020 - THE PANDEMIC ISSUE
ESSENTIAL
Gemma Collins
Survival and Grocery Shopping
That time of the week. Mom sitting at the kitchen table, neck craned over her bulky phone as she scrolls through another online grocery store. Ordinary, eggs and milk and vegetables, cherries if I’m lucky. Each aisle is three inches wide on the screen. I stay in the living room and hope for cherries, but I never ask her. I can’t interrupt.
Next day and I hear footsteps on the stoop. I don’t know who it is because our doorbell hasn’t been set up yet and we don’t have a peephole. We just moved and I miss my peephole. So I open the door and hope today was not the day I encounter one of the sex offenders who apparently lives a couple of blocks away. I learned this on a website my friend sent me last week. It’s just the groceries and I thank God even though I’m not religious just like I did yesterday when I got the pizza delivery. So I take the box from the UPS man into the kitchen. I’m unsure if my mom is in the mood to spray down the cheese and wash all of the vegetables with disinfectant, so I refrain from unpacking. I also don’t want to play Jenga again in our refrigerator chock full of random tupperware containers. Our fridge is a display of unessential items. I am not feeling up to another jar of peanut butter falling on me. I unfold the flaps of cardboard and dig through the box, soggy with leaking vegetable broth, to see if there are any cherries.
There isn’t. Just eggs and milk, which I don’t eat. I’m numb to disappointment by now so I fall back into my dent on the couch. It’s not like the cherries are essential. Or anything for that matter. I could live just fine off of the celery stalks and snap peas that stock the fridge. And what is really necessary when you could open the door to a sex offender because you don’t have a peephole or let a jar of peanut butter fall on your head because the fridge is too full. The UPS man could have been a murderer and maybe I just wonder that because I know I’ve watched way to many murder shows lately. Maybe all this alone time has made my short lifetime worth of philosophical thoughts boil down into opening the front door—but I think I could die at any moment, possibly slip on some disinfectant spray that made its way to the floor, and what good would some cherries be then?