I screamed in the middle of the pasta aisle, my voice shaking with rage as she deliberately placed the last box of my son’s specialty food into her cart.
This wasn’t just any shopping trip; it was a weekly battle for my son’s survival against my grocery store nemesis, a master of petty warfare.
For weeks, her campaign of tiny aggressions—a blocked aisle here, a stolen apple there—had worn me down to a raw nerve.
But the pasta was different. This was a declaration of war.
She thought she was just winning a stupid grocery store feud, but I was about to discover the one thing she held dear, and I would use it to deliver a kind of justice she never saw coming.
The Art of War, Aisle Four: The Anaphylaxis List
My grocery list wasn’t just a list. It was a high-stakes, laminated document of survival. A roadmap through a minefield of cross-contamination and mislabeled ingredients. For my son, Leo, the wrong brand of crackers or a granola bar with a trace of peanut dust wasn’t an inconvenience; it was a trip to the ER, an EpiPen jabbed into his thigh, the terrifying wheeze of his airways closing.
So, every Tuesday morning at 9:15 AM, I’d walk into the sterile, fluorescent hum of Market Basket with the focus of a bomb squad technician. The mission: acquire the twelve specific, non-negotiable items on Leo’s Safe List. Everything else was secondary.
This Tuesday was no different. I grabbed a cart with four functioning wheels—a small, treasured victory—and made a beeline for the produce section. The plan was always the same: get the safe stuff first, then circle back for the things Mark and I could eat without risking our son’s life. Predictability was my armor.
My target was the organic Gala apples, the only ones Leo’s sensitive system could tolerate. They were stacked in a perfect pyramid at the end of the aisle. I could see them from twenty feet away, a beacon of crimson and gold. I pushed my cart forward, a sense of calm efficiency settling over me.
That’s when I saw her. A disturbance in the force. A glitch in the matrix of my well-ordered routine. She was standing by the avocados, her cart parked sideways, a perfect blockade. The Cart-Witch.
The Avocado Gambit
She had a tense, wiry energy, her graying hair pulled back so tightly it seemed to stretch the skin over her cheekbones. She wasn’t looking at the avocados. She was watching me approach. Her eyes, small and dark, held a glint of competitive fury that was profoundly out of place next to a display of Hass avocados.
I gave a tight, polite smile—the universal signal for *I see you, please move your cart so I can get by*. She didn’t budge. Instead, she picked up an avocado, squeezed it with unnecessary force, and put it back, her gaze never leaving mine. It was a power move, a declaration. *This aisle is mine*.
I took a breath. This was a weekly ritual, a stupid, silent war I never asked to fight. I tried to maneuver around her, scraping my cart against the potato display. The sound was like nails on a chalkboard. She flinched, then glared as if I’d personally insulted her ancestors.
I finally cleared her blockade and reached the Gala apples. My hand hovered over the perfect one on top. Just as my fingers were about to close around it, her hand shot out like a viper, snatching the exact apple I was reaching for. She didn’t even look at it. She just dropped it into her cart with a dull thud and moved on to inspect the organic kale, her back ramrod straight.
My jaw tightened. It was so petty, so deliberate, it was almost comical. But with the weight of Leo’s safety on my shoulders, it didn’t feel funny. It felt like a personal attack.
About the Author
