By Isaac Fox
In aisle six—which is between the dry-herbs-and-cat-food aisle and the frozen aisle, and also close to the aisle with the office supplies and gluten-free products and DVDs, where I go check for good movies sometimes, but there never are any, and also pretty close to the aisle with the supplement shakes and the vibrators, but unfortunately not very close to the bagels, or the big mobile full of watermelons, or the seafood department—but not so far down aisle six that I was all the way to the candy bars, I was trying to pick out a 
birthday card for my mom, which I’ve done every year since I was seven, except my mom died right around the time I was born, and the floor was shiny, probably newly waxed, and I read some of the cards, and then I decided I wanted to think about the order of all the lined-up spotless products for a while instead, so I tried to remember which aisle it was—which aisle number—that had the office supplies and gluten-free products and DVDs, but I couldn’t, so I tried to remember the order from left to right of the products in the meat section, but I didn’t really want to think about meat all that much, either, while I was also thinking about my mom dying from complications of childbirth, so I looked back at the cards, but I still couldn’t pick one, so my mom stepped out of somewhere, like she has most years since I was seven, and picked herself a card, which I can’t complain about, because nobody, not even her own kid, especially not her own kid, could pick out a card for her better than she can pick one out for herself, and I tried to hug her like I always do, and I went through like I always do, so then I just walked up to the self-checkout, and on the way, I noticed a balloon in the rafters, so I looked around some more and saw that there were almost 20 of them up against the ceiling in different places, a Snoopy balloon, a Barbie balloon, a regular old red round one, and so on, although some were deflated and just dangling by their strings that had gotten caught in the rafters, and I imagined the static friction that must be all around the ones that were still inflated, rubbing against the cold metal ceiling, and I knew that at any moment any one of them could burst.
Isaac Fox writes crazy things, plays the clarinet and guitar, and spends as much time as possible outside. His work has previously appeared in Bending Genres, Tiny Molecules, and A Velvet Giant, among other publications. You can find him on Twitter at @isaac_k_fox.
MoonPark Review 