The Werewolf at the Grocery Store (a very short story)

Occasionally, I can be a bit of a busybody at the supermarket.

I'd gone in to get just a couple of things. I was out of shampoo and toilet paper. I wanted some beer.

Some crazy thirtysomething lady stood at the front of the line, arguing with the cashier about every little item in her cart. This item was supposed to be on sale. That item was misplaced on the shelf, and so she should get the lower price. The other one, she had a coupon for, but could she just have a couple seconds to find it? It was in her purse somewhere.

Trying not to become too impatient, I occupied myself by discreetly looking at what the people in front and in back of me were buying, and trying to figure out what was going on with them. The twentysomething girl behind me was sniffling. She had a box of Kleenex tissues in her cart, along with a bunch of candy bars and a gallon of ice cream. Rocky Road. She'd bought a paperback book from the little Books & Magazines aisle. The book's title: Why Men Hurt Us.

Poor thing. Probably just got dumped. Or cheated on. Or both.

I looked at the cart in front of me. It was a guy, and he had about twenty steaks. He wasn't buying anything else. No potatoes. No salad ingredients. Just a big old stack of Porterhouse steaks.

"Wow. Can I come over?" I asked.

The guy turned to look at me. Young guy, maybe nineteen or twenty. "Huh?"

"Looks like you're having a cookout tonight. Mind if I drop by?"

"Oh." He smiled back at me. "Yeah. The steaks."

"I'm serious, man," I said, just trying to kill time. "I love a good steak." The lady at the front of the line was about ready to pay, except now she was about thirty bucks short. She tried to decide which items to take off her bill with the painstaking deliberation a normal person might apply to choosing which of her twins was going to receive the heart transplant that had just come available and which was going to die.

"No, I'm not having company tonight. Full moon and all that, you know."

I tried not to laugh at him, but I'm sure my amusement shined through anyway. "What?" I asked. "You're afraid of werewolves? Terrified of Satanists out prowling the streets, looking for a virgin to sacrifice?"

"No. I'm not afraid of werewolves. I am a werewolf."

He said it with a ridiculous degree of seriousness. He spoke conversationally, though, as if he didn't care if people thought he was crazy. Maybe he was crazy, I thought.

"Ah. So I guess you've got a big evening planned. You and all your werewolf buddies gonna get together and eat raw steak tonight?"

His eyes didn't smile at me. "No. I just...I don't want to hurt anyone tonight. I thought if I had all this steak, and if I ate it...Maybe I won't hurt any people."