Evening rises and the Coles supermarket is a resounding cavern of limited time deals and benevolent markdowns. A little girl in pink pinstripe pyjamas makes a game of jumping between reflected light, fluorescent moons glaring on the speckled plastic floor.
The roof high above is an air-conditioner sky where ducts hang between joists as aluminium tunnels—a silvery playground. The little girl wants to hang from them like they are the vines of a jungle canopy. She could, if she climbed up the shelves, but she knows well that her mother would disapprove.
Instead, she keeps to the floor, jumping past bags of chips tumbled in Tuscany and jugs of lukewarm Refreshing Apple Juice with No Added Preservatives.
The girl is ready for bed and the world has ended. The supermarket is a uniform assortment of TimTams and Zooper Doopers and the gleaming pancakes of chicken in the deli dominion. The chicken smells damp—and she likes the taste well enough—but she’s intrigued by the smiley faces burnt onto each side. She stares at them through the glass, fogging up the cold surface. She swears she sees them blink.
Like preserved chicken behind deli glass, the world before is sealed in the pristine highway Coles. Barren asphalt encircles it for miles.
Her mum tells her off for shoving her hands into the walnuts because she isn't meant to touch display items. She likes the feeling of their wooden rattle as they tumble, just as she loves scratching the red wax off bananas and chewing on it. It tastes like Babybel cheese.
The little girl is given a list; the girl knows the list says things it doesn’t really mean, or it doesn’t say what it really should say. The list is never complete. She reads, ‘orange juice,’ but the girl knows there are lots of ways to buy orange juice, like ice orange juice and juice orange juice or that sickly sweet syrup orange juice—she would hate to make her mother explain.
The aisles crowd her as she wanders to find the regular juice, goosebumps prickling over her legs and arms, footsteps echoing hollow amidst packaged grains and dried fruit.
It's Saturday and the girl finds the orange juice next to an orange juicer. The cartons are tilted at a 65-degree angle in a manger of ice; the girl wants terribly to imagine they are walnuts, to run her hands through the sludge.
It reminds her of still winter days spent in the snow, scorched with second-hand sun. Her mother said not to eat the powdery slush left over on her skis, but she is always desperately thirsty when she sees it, and has no idea why.
The mouse hole, her mother calls it. The conveyer belt delivers her and her mother up the beginner’s hill repeatedly, constructed on an empty mountain with engines that chug chug chug to no end. It’s always too hot because the roof is plastic. It’s hotter still because of her limited pink Kathmandu jacket and discounted Uniqlo polyester thermals.
She asked her mother once why the snow on her skis did not melt. ‘It’s not real snow,’ she responded, her eyes hollowed by some endemic weariness. The girl realises that the snow on her skis is from the belly of a glacial beast and not the sky—there just isn’t enough real snow to go around.
Watched by moonbeam fluorescent lights, the girl reverently scoops some manger ice in her hands and takes a bite. It tastes like that cheap confetti paper the girl finds taped to gymnasium roofs. The violet paper tastes sour. It does turn tongues grey though, like the blue M&Ms in the confectionary aisle.
But here, in the nothingness between two aisles, the girl needs orange juice. She thinks that the juice must see the juicer as some sort of God and fear its violent, crushing ways. Her mother might think the juice grateful. The metal beast creaks and groans and rumbles, because it’s never turned off, and at night it roams the fruit aisle looking for more oranges to juice.
The orange juicer hums idly before the girl because it only ever consumes when the world cannot see. It’s not day, nor night—the world is caught in a weird space like the not-beginning of the universe, or a whisper, or a Target. The air conditioner sky never stops sheening. The polymer night outside is static, the hue of coffin tenants. The only window is a car park view that might have cost two million dollars twenty years ago.
Parking is permitted in the lot from 8am to 5pm for free, unless they think you have symptoms. On weekends, access is granted to customers, employees, and public transit users, but only upon payment of two Australian dollars, provided exclusively in one hundred five-cent coins. Entering in a Toyota Corolla is a lifetime ban. Even if the car is replaced, even if the plates change. They will know.
The girl finds the orange juice framed by harsh light, as though it is the nucleus of everything. The orange juice is on a throne of ice at the convergence of grain and nut aisles—the head of the grocery store. It’s special made orange juicer orange juice, after all.
It's Saturday night and there’s another list: ‘How to juice orange juice with the orange juice juicer.’ The girl grew up reading all the price tags and nutritional values she could find, hungry for something beyond the carbohydrates they promised; reading to understand, reading to survive, reading as brain-dead frantically as a clerk stacking cans.
The list is cold to the touch. Plastic laminate. Not a list but an ultimatum, because nobody touches the orange juicer and nobody knows if they’re allowed. But the orange juice still appears there every Saturday, as elusive as Santa Claus, or cats, or Blockbuster stores. The list has eight steps, but really seven—the first step is to turn it on, but the orange juice juicer is always on.
There are seven original steps on that laminate list, hanging over the orange juice, owed to the orange juice juicer. She scoops another handful of ice. It crunches like glass in her mouth and makes her parched throat ache for freshly pressed juice.
Now her hands are cold. The list of rules hung over the orange juicer tells it how to work. How to be. But tacked on underneath, scrawled over itinerary, is a new rule:
‘DO NOT EAT ICE.’
