Welcome, Shoppers

 

Standing there, Bob is befuddled. He doesn't understand what he's looking at. Last week he'd stood in this very same aisle, in this very same Target. There must have been one-hundred different options of soap and shampoo to choose from. On the top shelf—the shelf for men—was Head and Shoulders, Pantene, Dove, Herbal Essences, L'Oréal Paris, Garnier Fructis, Suave, TRESemmé, VO5, Prell, Neutrogena, and his favorite, Selsun Blue. Each one of these had their own special patented formula and corresponding conditioner. And each formula had an assortment of at least three different scents and a series of hair care options for different hair types: dry damaged hair, soft brittle hair, oily hair, treated hair, flaky hair, thinning hair and pubic hair. On the second shelf were the women's shampoos and conditioners. On the third shelf were the gender-neutral shampoo and conditioning products. The fourth shelf held shampoos specially designed for children. The fifth shelf had the organic, expensive stuff, and the dry shampoos, and finally, on the sixth shelf, toward the bottom, were shampoos for dogs and cats. Maybe there were even more than one-hundred. Bob hadn't counted.

Today, though, there were only two shelves, and they weren't labeled. Instead, a hodgepodge of bottles stood huddled in a fearful mass. Only a slim fraction of the previous products remained. Bob reaches up and rummages through the bottles. No Selsun Blue. He scratches his bald head. What bothers him is that the shelves below the first two are stocked with baby formula. All kinds of baby formula; Similac, Enfamil, Gerber, Parent's Choice, Up & Up, Nutramigen, Bubs, Happy Baby, SimulacTit, and Earth's Best. Where have all the shampoos gone? 

And where the fuck is Bob's Selsun Blue?

Customers come and go, paying no mind to the fact that the shampoo shelves are 66% bare. Panic begins to bubble inside Bob as he extends his hand toward an oily-haired woman and calls out, "miss, excuse me, but does anything seem strange to you about this aisle?" The woman stops to think for a moment.

"No," she says, and walks on.

Bob whirls around and sees an elderly woman turning into the aisle with a shopping cart stocked full of Oreos and boxed wine. Surely she's been around here long enough to notice this stunning loss of diversity.

"Excuse me, ma'am," Bob starts, his voice shaky, "I have a quick question for you. Something's bugging me and I just can't understand it."

"Sure," says the woman, "I have a moment."

"Well, you see these shelves here," Bob says, motioning to the shampoo shelves, "is it me or didn't they used to be—"

"Different?" she asks, interrupting Bob.

"Yes! So you see it too?"

"Yeah, before this used to be the chainsaw aisle."

"Huh? Chainsaw aisle?"

"Oh, wait. Was it chainsaws, or frozen foods? I can't remember now."

"Hold on now, I meant just last week. There were no chainsaws or ice cream here, it was shampoo."

"Last week? Forgive me, dear, I haven't been here in years."

"Ah."

"Yeah. I come here once in a while to stock up on my favorite cookies and, uh," she pauses as she sees Bob noticing the fifty gallons of boxed wine, "it's so embarrassing, but aw hell, it's my favorite drink! You gotta have things you enjoy in this life, you know. We're here for a good time, not a long time, honey. That's why I come in here and buy up every box of wine and Oreos I can fit in my big truck."

Bob felt his body withdrawing before his words did. His feet were already pointing away from the old woman. Just now he sees his knees are turned, too, swiveled at his hips like a G.I. Joe action figure. 

"Ok, thank you ma'am, enjoy your day."

"You, too, I hope you find what you're lookin' for."

The woman strolls away into the busy blur of shoppers. Bob stands with his thumb, index and middle fingers pressed against his jaw as he stares at the missing shelves. I just know something is wrong here. It can't be.

"Excuse me," a short spectacled woman with curly hair wearing a red polo shirt says from behind Bob.

"Oh, pardon me," Bob says, moving aside. The woman is an employee of the store and she's restocking the shelves of formula. She begins unpacking fresh containers of MiracleMilk and placing them on the shelf with an impatient and exasperated sigh.

"Say, can I ask you a question?" Bob says kindly.

"Yep," the woman says without looking up or stopping what she's doing.

"Well, I was wondering if you could help me understand where all the shampoo has gone."

"It's right there on those shelves," she says, motioning to where Bob is looking.

"Hmm, well maybe you have more in the back?" 

"What you see is what we got."

"But you're here restocking the MiracleMilk, and I can see some SimulacTit there, too. So there must be more stuff in the back."

"Yeah, I was just back there, and there ain't no shampoo," she says with irritation.

"I don't know what you're so upset about, I just asked you a simple question. I was here last week and there were six shelves of shampoos and now there's only two and I can't find my Selsun Blue. Maybe you can check or ask someone to check and see if you have some?"

"Listen, man, I just work here. This isn't even my aisle. My aisle is emotional support pickles. I told you, I was in the back and there ain't no shampoo there."

"You know what, I hate to do this, but can you get your manager for me?"

"Sure," she says, dropping the box of MiracleMilk to the floor with a loud thud. The woman stomps off, muttering under her breath and leaving a path of muddy boot-marks behind her. She is gone a long time. At least seven minutes have passed. Bob is getting angry. 

She thinks she's slick, doesn't she? She's just gonna have me here waiting like a big ole dummy and not come back? Not today. No to-day! 

Bob does a quick about-face and begins marching after the muddy prints. Like an expert tracker, he follows the creature's trail through the store. The path meanders through numerous aisles; the desiccated fish aisle; the genital wart removal aisle; the single use spoons aisle; the taxidermied lawn ornaments aisle; the loose screws aisle; the dehydrated water, ultrapasteurized yogurt and non-food watermelons aisle. And then he sees her, standing at the end of a long aisle, in a red doorway, with her back turned. Bob trudges on through the aisle, step by step, inch by inch, focused solely on the soles of the woman's mud-stained shoes. It's only until he's a few feet away that he realizes what aisle he's standing in. All around him are child sex-robot prosthetics. Little arms and legs and hands and feet, scalps, silicon skin, wigs and cherub-like faces. Bob has never seen this aisle before. He pauses, mortified, not wanting to be seen in such a place. The aisle is a dead-end, though. The only way out is to turn around and walk back through.

His feet abruptly spin around and he begins to briskly jog through the aisle of depraved sex objects. Motorized vaginal canals and high-suction oral orifices whir with a mechanical criminality. Anal cavities pucker and relax like the lips of petshop fish. His heart is pounding. The aisle seems endless. Now he's passing circuit boards and batteries, power cables and apparel, different shaped tongues. 

"Hey!" a voice calls out from behind him. 

He turns and sees the short spectacled woman in the doorway is now facing him and motioning for him to come back. She's holding a small bottle of what appears to be Selsun Blue. Bob hesitates. He wants nothing more than to extricate himself from this aisle. But all he has to do is walk over and get the shampoo. It would take three-minutes, max. Maybe no one would see him. 

No, this is too strange. What the hell is this place? It's better to just leave and go to a different store.

"No thanks, I've got to go. Sorry for the trouble," Bob shouts across the aisle.

All the motorized mouths (and anuses) suddenly stop moving. Bob's ears feel like he's going up in an airplane. Everything sounds low and muffled. The woman glares at him from the doorway, her long arm slowly lowering like a mechanical crane. Bob starts moving his feet in the opposite direction. His body turns to follow, but not before crashing into the cart of another shopper. He slams his left knee right into the front of the plastic red cart. He looks up. The short spectacled woman with curly hair and red shirt stands holding the cart.

"Gah," Bob gasps audibly. He whips his head back over his right shoulder to look back at the red doorway. The doorway is gone. 

"Sorry, I, I, I was just leaving," Bob stammers.

Before Bob can even blink the woman snatches him by the wrist. He tries to wrench free but her grip is like iron. He leans back and pulls with all his might but she stands anchored to the floor. Bob's caught in a bear trap. Frantically he starts yanking at his arm with his free hand and whimpering.

"Listen you sick fuck, you know why this store exists? Because of people like you. Weak, pathetic pieces of shit like you. Ou, where's my Selsun Blue, where's my Selsun Blue, I gotta have my Selsun Blue. Two shelves of bullshit overpriced products full of microplastics and chemical pollutants weren't enough for you? You just had to have your shampoo, right? These things are all the same, they're owned by the same three companies!" the woman says, growling.

"Ok, I get it. I'll leave, I'll never come back, just, let me go. Please. I promise I won't come here ever again."

"No, you don't get it," the woman says, "you obviously don't get it. Because if you got it, you wouldn't have followed me through the store, hunting me like some bald creep. Why the fuck do you need shampoo anyway, asshole?"

"Well, I still have a little bit of hair and it gets—"

"Shut the fuck up and remember what I'm about to say: we had a richness you couldn't even fathom. This planet was teeming with a diversity that would put your six shelves of shampoo to shame. Now, in a matter of 200 years, it's a ghost of what it once was. A fucking shell of itself. We've lost so much. And for what?! For you to have 32 different flavors of ice cream at Baskin Robbins? A new set of iPhones every year? I got rid of those shelves, motherfucker. Me. I'm doing my part. Me and many like me. We're taking this shit down from the inside. We're everywhere, and we're always watching. We have you on video in this aisle. I wonder what your family might think if they saw it. So now I'm deputizing you, dipshit. Do your fuckin' part. Make better choices, choices that benefit the whole. Stop thinking about your individual needs and think about the collective. Think about the non-humans. The plants. The minerals. They've been here longer than you. Show some fuckin' respect," she says, letting him go and spitting a thick green loogie onto the man's chest.

"Gah," Bob gasps again as the loogie makes impact. It stings his pride worse than a hot bullet.

"Now get the fuck out of my sight, and remember—do your part. These fuckers can't sell you shit you don't buy," the woman says sternly.

Bob scurries out of the aisle and out of the store. He ambles to his car, panting, unlocks the door, pulls open the handle and sits down. He angles his rearview mirror down to look at the loogie. It's a disgusting green, gelatinous glob of many hundreds of bacteria and microorganisms. A complex ecology of symbiosis. At the edges it's begun to harden into a fine crust. With a klink Bob opens his glovebox and removes a single tissue to scrape the phlegm off his shirt.

"I think I'll just try Walgreens instead."