Rita Williams

Friday night, feeling sorry for my sorry ass

I am drawn by the cheery, cherry ‘Lucky’ sign and insert myself into the last slot in the lot.

Inside, the neon’s humming, light, planning, placement

The only other sound is the doofus wheel of my rusty, squeaky cart

I am come seeking the solace of vegetables.

And, There They Are!

Pornographic. Prolific. Proferred in rows like prostitutes in Rotterdam.

Yellow squash, intriguing little knobs, genuine in genuflection toward the buxom kabochas.

Mustard greens, verdant, curly and crisp, ends, in restraints, snipped blunt.

Habaneros waxed and shiny with seeded tongues of lethal flame like the daughters of peppery cobras.

The sulking beets looked peaked to be stashed between the thuggish rutabagas and the paltry parsnips.

Parsnips. Such an unfortunate race.

Not a bit pretty. No matter what you do, they never look clean.

Off color, odd taste. Fibrous and mealy.

Not quite carrots. Not exactly turnips. Neither turgid nor impertinent, just lobbed there amidst their cousins whose susurrus whisper in extravagant cuisines.

Such guilt I feel, leaving them -- Vegetal pets in this freon shelter

Then the water spray startles me, and the carrots too, their lacy chlorophylic frisson, they hiss in fright,

and I beat my clattering retreat as pleats of darkness ripple down the aisle, blotting out the green, the gold, pluot and plum, the gleam is gone, the glitter grays, it’s done.

I sidle up to the cashier with a pack of American Chiefs Long and a 40

Lucky, she forgets to charge me for the show.

Rita Williams is the author of If the Creek Don’t Rise. Her work has appeared in Drinking Diaries: Women Serve Their Stories Straight UP, Best Food Writing for 2007, The Los Angeles Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, O at Home, Saveur, The Utne Reader and Fins and Feathers. A contributing editor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, she is currently working on a novel, “Hammered”. She is also a member of the USA TV Writer’s Room on the “Queen of the South” scheduled to debut March, 2016.