This show is a Grocery Store show. Grocery Store, denoting a construction similar to the Office Work Place (show), or the Family Home (show). The prime time landscape is populated with all sorts of premises: Cop Shows, Bar Shows, Hospital Shows, Up and Coming Stand-Up Comedian shows. The conceptual diversity of serial absurdity is immense.
     Our show is a Grocery Store show, wherein Grocery Store acts as referent to that American amphitheater of the dry good and the produce aisle. It is here within our Grocery Store show, we entertain you, move you, speak and breathe on your smart TV. There will be two moments in the next twenty-two minutes in which everything stops—ceases to exist.
     This is a commercial break.
     You, the viewer, will see a diagram of a human heart pumping human blood in human agony, only to be soothed by the application of an antacid or antidepressant or low-calorie alcoholic seltzer. The advertisements will continue:
     A man meets God, buys insurance.
     A girl gets killed, buys tampons.
     A dog speaks, a city burns: Gatorade Zero.
     Meanwhile, the characters float. While you watch that human heart writhe, we are suspended in liminal space. Here, nothing exists. Our mouths feel cold, tasting metallic—like our tongues have begun to bleed. As the show recommences, we are dragged by a churning pressure through the unseeable dark back to our aisles. Placed into position, coiled, and then loosed: Breathing. Speaking. Doing mime. The laughing goes here.
     In some shows, we can hear the laughter.
     In some sense, the laughter can hear us.
     This show, these funny shows, don't exist to say the newest things, but rather to say the same things that are always said, and in saying them once more: point out how silly it is to say such a thing at all. Let alone constantly.
     They call this technology the situational comedy.

Today, in Season 4, I am stacking cans. I will stack these cans all episode. There was discussion, in the Writers' Room, about if the audience could handle me doing a sequence of tasks over the fake week/episode. Different things: stacking plastic bags of pastas, boxes of cereals, sweeping piles of lint. The head writer scoffed. Between guffaws, he said: stacking cans is more than enough. And so I stack cans. I make fifteen dollars an hour for work that is never finished. I would get health insurance, too, in this state. Except that I don't exist—in this state.
     Here at the store, I work as the Shift Lead for Dry Goods and Canned Foods, but my job on the television program is as Protagonist and Narrator. This means I am pithy, and observant, and a C-cup. People will listen to a woman narrate from the mouth just above her breasts much longer if those breasts are C-cups.
     I narrate via voice-over. A voice-over being a strange dramatic contraption formed using a narrative conceit and a jerry-rigged speaker system that the Writers' Room installed throughout the grocery store. The speaker system ensures everyone can hear each explication of events I render in pithy remarks and timely references. The OverVoice is nearly my own, but equalized in post-production—wholly inescapable to everyone I know. Utterly hilarious, I am assured.
     When I hear my own tinny ideas through the speaker, I call it meta-cognition. I learned this word from a magazine at the checkstand. An article about the human brain. Beside an article on how alpaca milk can be used to make deodorant.
     I don't really voice serious comments over the speaker system. It's mostly sardonic phrases about trending celebrities meant to be repeated in a silent GIF set. Sometimes, like once a season, I say something about childhood food insecurity. Something safe. Like that child hunger is bad. And fashion, I talk about clothes a lot. Apparently, I have so many thoughts about pants.
     Half the cans on the shelf have just vanished. Mostly they were soup cans—chicken noodle, minestrone, things people recognize, can cognicize. Nothing weird. Like menudo. According to the labels, the soups are made by Schampbell's.
     I owned three cans of this soup; stored it in a cupboard above the sink in my apartment. I remember that. I liked to eat it cold.

In my apartment, there was a bed. For sleeping. A toilet, a small desk, and a sofa. For living. We were only in my small apartment for one three minute scene. But, God, I remember knowing so many things about myself in that space. I forgot most of it, later, and now I understand that information—whatever it was—was mostly just about groceries.
     In the scene, if you care, I awoke. Sweaty. My body rose mechanically—like a gimmick machine in a haunted house. I saw a barn owl, they told me, out the window, and was startled. I yelped and fell out of bed. My bedmate—there was a bedmate!—was dragged by my flailing onto the floor. I elbowed her in the face. She groaned. I cheated to the camera, at which point, this woman pinned me to the hardwood.
     The joke was that Elizabeth—the bedmate—as well as being a grocer, had fought in Afghanistan and seen unspeakable things. And I, knowing these facts, chose not to know them and instead to craft nicknames.
     I called her "Captain Overreaction." The laughter was hearty and loud, as Elizabeth relived an unspeakable trauma on my green shag bath mat.
     I made her breakfast that morning. I would like to think it was an apology, but I know it was actually blocking. The scene showed how we were each anorexic in our own way, and despite being lesbians, Elizabeth and I were really just people, in a heterosexual relationship, comprised of two women.
     I placed Elizabeth's eggs, bacon, and low-carb toast in front of her while wearing a t-shirt and the suggestion of underpants. She smiled, and her teeth told the audience: Do not be afraid! This is a perfectly normal way for things to happen!
     Elizabeth still works at the grocery store. Now, five seasons later, we are engaged to be married in a wedding which will be a breakthrough for the state of representation on television. They tell me. Which is so wonderful, and I would be excited, except: I do think Elizabeth despises me.

I place twenty or so cans on the bottom most shelf, and look at Timothy, the General Manager, while he talks about the fact an entire great white shark's carcass was delivered to the fish counter. By complete accident. Completely without cause. He is eating corn nuts.
     Timothy provides an intense amount of information that is neither relevant to my job, nor wholly appropriate to the workplace. While popping corn nuts into his mouth. I can tell he keeps cheating to the camera, so I nod. I do my thing with my lips where it looks like I'm smiling. I ask how he knows it's a great white shark. He tells me he Binged it. Using the Microsoft search engine Microsoft Bing. Then he drops the corn nuts wrapper on the floor and walks away.
      I would have picked it up, but the commercials arrived, and I myself was thrown elsewhere.

Every day, I wear the same thing: green polo shirt, khaki pants, non-slip shoes, and a small name tag that says: Cassie. And in smaller letters: ask me about our daily special. Everyone I know wears the same outfit, except their name tags say different names. None of our mothers chose these names. I'm not entirely sure any of us have mothers.

Jonah, our twenty-year-old Courtesy Clerk, wears a red cap, always backwards. The hat—ripe strawberry red—signifies that he loves the Chicago Bulls. None of us are sure what a Chicago Bull is, only that it's not the sort of thing we stock in the meat case.
     If someday I leave this place, exit this store, but keep on breathing—I hope I go far enough to see a real Chicago Bull. I imagine they are completely white, except in rain, where they turn a delicate shade of dove gray. Divine, regal. Broad and tall, with flanks like wide prairies speckled with aster. I picture these bulls ambling through intersections, tails held high, holding up traffic to peck at small weeds in the cracked asphalt. Some asshole lays on his horn, but these soft-moving optimists just breathe easy as their ivory horns curve toward the sun. I think this must be similar to what a dream is: this conjuring I do, when there is little else to be done. I am a fictional character, so I do not dream. I just hold this image—these white bulls—in my head, and do not whisper it into the voice-over.

Sometimes when it is just us hiding in the break room, or the supply closet, or the disabled toilet stall in the women's room, and I know Elizabeth is meant to look at me with ardent love and endless affection, she only looks like she is close to vomiting.

I've never seen Elizabeth naked because this is a network sitcom about a grocery store, but I understand because of a groundbreaking and intense and also queer and thus gorgeously eroto-aesthetic conversation in Season Three, that she has significant scarring on her torso from an IED. The device exploded under her, as she carried an injured orphan through an active bombardment in rural Afghanistan. Three hundred thousand people belly laughed when she said that. They showed me the ratings, so I would understand.
     I actually still do not understand?
     I told her, back then in Season Three, standing in the relative privacy of the dairy fridge, that I loved her body. Which was mostly a lie—I barely knew what her ankles looked like. I wish I could have said, instead, something like: I thought what you did was brave. You deserve to be proud of yourself. I could never fathom making the same choice. I wanted to say to Elizabeth: I know I am a coward—a grocer, and little else—and so incredibly sorry. About all of the backstory you have to hold inside of you. And still make space to breathe.
     I really had wanted to say the word sorry, but my mouth would not make the shape of it.
     Instead, the audience watched me ask: did you save the orphan because women have a wonderful maternal impulse even in crisis? Elizabeth's jaw tightened.
     A fact I know about Elizabeth: she was not a soldier, she was a translator. She speaks Arabic, Farsi, and French fluently, but she works at this grocery store because she spends so much time reliving her job in the war, she can't keep a white-collar job in America.
     I wanted to tell her: it's horrible you have seen a dead child. It's horrible the writers write so many dead children into this comedy program, into your brain specifically. In your shoes, I would be a violent person.
     Instead, I made a joke. About the price of oatmeal, and the pacifist nature of the Quaker religion. The punchline erupted from my mouth like I had coughed up a clot of blood, and immediately we were swarmed with laughter.
     The commercials broke then. The liminal dark slipped onto the scene, swallowed my feet, my knees, up to my neck, until all of me floated in the void. My mouth tasted like blood as I thought: is Elizabeth here, too? I turned my neck to look for her amid the undark expanse, but found I could not move.
     I had wanted to ask if Elizabeth flew over an ocean to get to her war? If she could explain it: what an ocean looks like viewed from the sky. Does it look alive? Do the undulating waves look like breath? Is the shimmering water like a slippery skin? I wanted to ask my questions, but I did not want to admit where they came from. I did not want to divulge to Elizabeth the details of my strange practice of failing to dream. I could not fathom asking her: what is it like to go swimming? Because what's more pathetic than admitting the largest body of water you have seen is a flooded sink or a broken freezer. Because why would she tell me? And if she did: what would I do?

I once read, in a checkstand magazine, the difference between tragedy and comedy is a quantity of time. Some celebrity was talking about a school shooting, or police shooting, or maybe it was a tsunami. I don't remember, but the article was beside an article about how straight-leg jeans are a timeless wardrobe staple.
     I was wearing khaki pants.

The shark carcass somehow makes it into the parking lot; begins to cook under the heat of a mid-afternoon suburban sun. Before, it would cook, though, the dead shark had to unfreeze.
     The 2016 US Olympic Track and Field team is making a cameo this episode.
     Coincidences occur. Recur. A storyline arises. A plot metastasizes from the space between scenes. Comedy enacts itself. A man who ran the hundred-meter hurdles in London leaps over the body of a poached animal thawing in the parking lot. This is a situation. The laughter falls from the hidden parts of our sound-stage sky, like bombardment. This is how we know we are good.

The final gag involves me choking on shark's blood.
     Jonah hands me a glass of it; he has to tell me it is a new flavor of kool-aid. I have to believe Jonah, the Courtesy Clerk—I must look past the apologetic hesitation in his smile. I take the paper cup and show all my teeth.
     The taste is metallic and acerbic, unsweet. I count the beats I am to wait per The Writers' Room's directions. The thick liquid, unlike syrup but not completely, squirms into the gaps between my molars. I see Elizabeth watching me, her mouth pulled like a taut line. Sometimes I wish I deserved Elizabeth's anger—it is a such a vivid thing.
     My face changes, makes a shark blood shape.
     I spit-take to the freeze-frame.
     This green polo was my favorite shirt. It is covered in blood, stain setting as the camera pans. Our theme music kicks into a ruckus, laughter pelts the bone dry pavement almost like rain.
     The credits roll.

Dark envelops me—lifting me from the summer hot parking lot. My mouth fills with a metallic taste. I think about cerulean water. Dried kidney beans, their soft skins the color of rich soil. An unspeakable depth blooms beneath my soft kicking feet. I breathe deep. There is no air. Everything here hums softly, receipt paper feeding itself, ceaselessly, through a register.
     I do not sink; nothing happens.
     I imagine a herd of Chicago Bulls, white like lumbering snow drifts, entering a meadow. Each bull bows to bite at the young sprung grass. The blades are so green, God must have painted them himself. A young one nuzzles at a daisy; yellow pollen polka-dots his pink nose. Eventually, the herd lays down to sleep, under a sky brimming with stars, and the arcing flight of a lone barn owl. They dream—gargantuan stories full of flying fish.

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This piece began as a final for the author's feminist gothic lit final in 2025. What if in 2025 we don't get stuck haunting houses? But genre-forms? How is a story already a haunted house in this century?