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Reese likes to play an imaginary game using the sixteen squares above the produce section.
The grocery store ceiling bears a resemblance to a checkerboard, its tiles creating a stringent pattern with alternating colors of fluorescent white lights and grainy brown drywall. The juxtaposing design is an eyesore, and she has to play on a smaller scale compared to the standard board, but she makes it work. The challenge is a perfect distraction.
Moving her dark piece diagonally to the upper right, she ends up being captured by her pretend opponent. Two squares kitty-corner from the ploy, a light flickers...
Rewind.
There's a piece tucked in the bottom left corner that illuminates from the flash. It can be moved without being overthrown, so she plays her turn again. No consequences occur this time. That's much better.
Alas, a bleached retina will do Reese no good if she stays in a trance of staring at the ultraviolet beams, so she tears her eyes away and instead focuses on the array of freshly-misted vegetables directly in front of her.
Rutabaga. What the hell does a rutabaga look like?
The paper list in her pocket feels like an anchor weighing her down. She prefers not to go shopping alone, but her detrimental procrastination and social anxiety problems have led her to the place she currently stands at a quarter past midnight. No one else is around except for the zombie-like employees that roam the vacant aisles and robotically stock shelves, which is the exact reason why she decided to venture out at the odd time.
Reese roughly swallows down the apprehension that crawls up her parched throat and sidetracks herself by counting the heads of iceberg lettuce. Two, four, six, eight...
Rewind.
Her single mission is to find rutabaga, so she mouths the ill-sounding syllables and scans the rows of cruciferous vegetables, attempting to find one that might look unfamiliar. There's kale, cauliflower, and radishes, but nothing that appears as a godforsaken rutabaga. It's the last item she needs on her list, and with her pathetic luck, it happens to be an impossible hunt.
Reese just wants to go home. It's late, the rain is pouring outside, and her eyes burn from either insomnia or her long game of ceiling checkers. The skin of her cuticles has been picked raw, and her cheeks are starting to become prickled with heat because she's getting frustrated. She could ask for help, but that would be a crippling recipe for disaster considering her social skills amount to zero. There's also no need to be a burden, especially to minimum wage workers who also want to go home.
Taking out her phone from her sherbet orange puffer coat that she bought because it looked like a Creamsicle, Reese slides down on the cracked screen to open the search bar. She types out a few incorrect spellings of the unknown vegetable — rootabega, rootabayga, rutabayga? Thankfully, spell check comes to her aid.
