Candles

The third store we visit has been raided. The shelves are like rows of gapped teeth—missing flashlights, missing batteries, missing fans, missing gallon jugs of water. Our list is a prayer in your clasped hands. “What about candles?” you ask, and the nervous girl hanging lighters on the endcap takes us through the aisles to décor. “Not much left,” she says as she eyes the few colorful glass cylinders on the shelf. Is she reconsidering her own supply? Will she return here to scavenge the remains? I notice, then, that she has a bump of her own, but I know better than to ask. She retreats back to the lighters, and I watch, out of the corner of my eye, as she bends and hangs and slides.

“Pumpkin spice?” you say as you wave one of the candles under my nose. The smell is cinnamon, clove, and maple—but not pumpkin.

I turn back to you and shake my head. “Please don’t ruin pumpkin spice for me.”

“I forgot you’re an addict.” You clink the cylinder holder down and retrieve the pink one. “How about this?” Watermelon, oversweet, like the fruit has turned.

“Worse,” I say. My sense of smell has always been stronger than yours, but the extra estrogen in my body has turned me bloodhound. I point to the white ones, Clean Laundry. “Just buy two of those, and let’s get out of here.”

“Fine.” Your voice is angry, trying to be calm. You are probably thinking, Why did you bring me here? 

I am thinking about it, too.

Of course, we never use those candles. Or the one jug of water we find in the cracker aisle at Walmart. Or the sanitary wipes. Or the black beans, baked beans, sliced carrots, peaches in 100% juice, saltines, minestrone soup, all still towered in the back of the cabinet like soldiers ready to deploy at a flicker of the lights. We never use any of them, because we are not there to watch the trees fall against our chain-link fence. Maybe we should go?, we vaguely ask our neighbor, a true Tallahassee man, and he says, with his calm voice and waiting-to-catch-a-fish gaze, I think that would be best. This is a man who slept through the last hurricane. This is a man who knows how to batten down the hatches with storm shutters and sandbags. He is our litmus test—If the locals are all staying, we tell ourselves, then who cares what the privileged students do?—but that morning, after he tells us what is best, we pack our bags and leave within the hour.

We are lucky we find an article about filling up our tank so we can use the car to charge our phones.

We are lucky we don’t have a good car, the kind that only takes premium-unleaded, and that we make it all the way to Troy, Alabama, without needing to stop at the gas stations, most of which are emptied like breast at the mouths of famished babes and left with plastic bags on the handles like the white flags of surrender. We are lucky, lucky, lucky to be those privileged students; or, rather, for me to be that student, and for you to be that privileged—and don’t I feel it, as you swipe your credit card at the desk and I put my hands on my belly and think, We’re safe now.

Originally published in An Inventory of Abandoned Things (Split/Lip Press).