The Shopping List - Flash Fiction by Alexia Wdowski

She bends down on a sunny day chasing a scrap of paper moving on the pavement. It’s another shopping list. A good one. Intact. She unfolds the paper. She can see the words LOO ROLL written in round even lettering. A good sample. Literate. Sensible. No panicking scrawl here. Not this one.

The words are like magic. Incarnations in broad daylight. She reads the rest. There are two sections. In one there are the words. ‘Two small lasagnes.’ Not one large lasagne. Maybe a person who lives alone and wants two separate dinners. Maybe a couple who won’t eat from the same dish but will shop their dinners from the same shopping list.

LOO ROLL

WASHING TABS

Oh it must be so nice to know what you want and put it on a list and go shopping and know what you want because you put it on a list. And in that way you cast spells over your environment. I want this and you get it.

Do you get exactly what you want?

Or is there a compromise to be made somewhere along the way. Is there a moment of panic where they don’t have exactly your item and you are lost again. You’re lost and needing to improvise madly, daily inventions that take up the space in your mind where you could be singing. You could be making up a new way to bake banana bread.

You could be writing the plot for a new novel in a new world that none of us quite understand yet but you’re thinking about toilet roll instead, and calculating sums and stop-starting in the aisles thinking—how does it all get put together? A life, so full of things.

But it’s interesting isn’t it? This world. And you have to be brave to be in it. So you write a little list, let’s all write a little list, and tick off items one by one and work out what to ask for.

To Do List