Walmart, November First by Willa Neubauer

WALMART, NOVEMBER FIRST

I wish, on days like these, that I could go to Walmart. There’s a sanctuary of sounds and lights within the plastered brick building. Chemicals and lacy undergarments, men’s XL t-shirts hanging from high-up shelves. Long coils of garden hose, pitchforks with purple handles. The aisles are dirty from workmen boots, the footsteps of mother’s towing screaming blonde babies by their skinny wrists down plastic aisles. On the loudspeaker, someone calls Alec towards reception. There’s a horrible peace about it. The machine-made objects, the commercial alignment of products and the way it is one store yet the whole of America, too. Somewhere, where I am not, a father lifts his child into the plastic seat of a grocery cart, and that child asks for candy. A woman looks for earrings beside her aged mother, who grasps for her hand, unaware of who stands beside her. Towards reception, a large, tattooed man carries bananas in a plastic bag towards the checkout line, stopping to flip through magazines, noticing Meghan Markle’s new haircut. He spots the father whose child now screams, reddened, and the woman’s mother who wanders towards the electrical strips in aisle eight, unaware of her daughter’s frantic calls from two aisles down. The man puts his rain jacket on, noticing through the automatic glass doors that the parking lot is damp. He hopes the roads towards home don’t freeze.

I wish, on days like these, November firsts, that I could go to Walmart to leave Walmart again. I like the hit of cold, the sound of cars and single mothers pulling crying babies from the flannel-lined car-seats. I like the movement of air blowing plastic against the sides of buildings. I like the smell of the wind, gasping at the edges of my bag full of coat-hangers. The cold air outside reminds me what oxygen, moisture, plants are like. There is an airiness, breathlessness, a freedom between my own car and the