Your Turn to Suffer

it hadn’t been washed in a while. A strong ripe scent of body odor emanated from the woman, as if she were surrounded by a dense cloud of stink. The only other odd detail about her – so minor that it seemed unimportant compared to the others – was the nail of her left pinky finger was painted red. Her other nine fingernails were devoid of polish.

Lori was so taken aback by the woman’s appearance that she didn’t fully register her words.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

The woman – goat eyes fixed on Lori – took half a step forward. The smell of her body odor became more intense, and Lori wrinkled her nose and half turned her head in a vain attempt to mitigate the stench’s effect.

“Confess and atone – or suffer.”

The woman’s voice was sandpaper-rough, and her breath had a strangely fruity smell. Lori wondered if she were ill.

The woman leaned her face closer to Lori, and although it wasn’t, couldn’t be possible, her rectangular pupils rotated in opposite directions. Startled, Lori stepped backward quickly, colliding with the spices on the shelves and knocking a number of them to the floor. She lost her grip on her shopping basket, and it fell to the floor as well, tipping over as it landed, the ingredients for her dinner spilling forth. Her purse slipped off her shoulder and slid down to her forearm, but she managed to keep it from falling.

The woman stared at her a moment longer, but made no further effort to come closer. Then, without saying anything more, she turned and started walking down the aisle, away from Lori. She walked with slow, shuffling steps, and it seemed to take a long time before she reached the end of the aisle, turned, and was lost to sight.

Lori hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath until her lungs began to ache. She inhaled deeply, and instantly regretted it. The combined smells of the woman’s strong body odor and her strange fruity breath still suffused the air. She wanted to get out of there, and she was tempted to leave her groceries where they’d fallen, haul ass out to the parking lot, jump in her Honda Civic, drive off at full speed, and never come back. But she didn’t. She wouldn’t have been much of a physical therapist if she didn’t know how to keep going when the going got tough – or in this case, bizarre.

She slid her purse back up to her shoulder, then knelt down and began picking up items and putting them back into the plastic shopping basket. She breathed shallowly to minimize the impact of the woman’s stink, and she tried not to think about those goat eyes and how they had appeared to rotate in their sockets. No, it hadn’t been the eyes themselves that moved. Only the pupils had rotated. She wasn’t sure how she knew this, but she did. Still, did it matter? Either way was equally fucked up.

Once she’d retrieved her meager supply of groceries, she picked up the spices she’d knocked down and put them back in their proper places on the shelves. Feeling better now that she’d restored at least a small bit of order to the world, she picked up the shopping basket and headed toward the self-checkout. She still didn’t have any garlic powder, but it didn’t matter anymore. She intended to buy the groceries, but right now the notion of making food – let alone eating it – nauseated her. All she wanted to do was go home, put her groceries away, and take a long hot shower, using copious amounts of body wash to cleanse the woman’s stink from her skin and hair. She’d toss her uniform into the wash as well. And if she couldn’t get the stench out of the fabric, she’d throw the uniform away. She had others.

Look forward, push onward.

She told her patients this, but it was something of a personal mantra for her as well. It had gotten her through a lot in her life, and it would get her through an encounter with a crazy woman in FoodSaver. But despite her determination to put the incident behind her, she heard the woman’s rough voice speak once more in her mind.

Confess and atone – or suffer.

* * *

Lori left the store, carrying her groceries in a single plastic bag that dangled from her left hand. A pleasant breeze caressed her body, and the sky was a bright, clear blue. Small trees had been placed throughout the parking lot, and while most of their leaves were still green, some had begun to change color. A few dry ones had fallen, and they made soft skittering sounds like small insects as the wind blew them across the asphalt. The scene wasn’t perfect, of course. It was the tail end of the evening rush hour, and while downtown Oakmont, Ohio, was hardly a busy metropolitan hub, the traffic flowing past FoodSaver was steady, and the air held the faint tang of exhaust fumes.

It would smell worse if the wind wasn’t blowing, she thought, and she reminded herself to be thankful for small graces. Not that she was religious. Her parents were more or less devout Lutherans, but both she and her sister had stopped going to church years ago. She still considered herself spiritual, though, in a loosey-goosey nondenominational way. Besides, it never hurt to appreciate the good things in life, even the small ones.

The lot was full for a Tuesday night, and she’d had to park farther away from the store’s entrance than she usually did. That was okay, though. She had an app on her phone that recorded the number of steps she took in a day and how many calories she burned by walking. So as far as she was concerned, the more she walked, the better. Her car was parked close to the street, next to a tall lamppost. She always tried to park next to one, day or