There’s a crazy lady in the grocery store. She shuffles down the ice cream aisle in dirty bunny-ear slippers, her oversized bathrobe sloughing off her right shoulder. Her hair’s stuck in a sloppy bun, she smells like she thought deodorant was exchangeable with Febreze, and she’s wielding a large wooden spoon. There’s no tag on it. Maybe something she brought from home? She’s just whacking it around as she mutters to herself, using it to punctuate words only she can hear. People give her a wide berth as they walk past. It’s shocking no one has notified whoever you notify in situations like this.

I’ll be honest: this isn’t me at rock bottom. I’ve been at rock bottom. This is just another Sisyphus slide on the way down.

To be fair, I wouldn’t have stumbled out of my apartment looking like a crazy lady if I thought it’d been at all a reasonable hour. I figured I’d be contending with the typical 2am crowd: craving pregnant women, teens riddled with late-night munchies, the junkies, the sex workers. 

But no. It’s early morning on a crisp Spring day, just a half hour “L” ride from the heart of Chicago. And the grocery store is full - I mean absolutely overflowing - with contributing members of society who are visibly distressed at the sight of me.

I thought it was a step up, honestly. I’d been fused to the sofa for clearly much longer than I’d estimated and I wanted ice cream and I thought, you know what? Be proactive, Helen. Stop nursing your depression. You get up off that sofa and you get some ice cream, girl.

Of course, now that I’m here, I’m not sure what the verdict is. Is this worse or better? Like, if I could afford a therapist, would they be more or less disappointed in me? I mean, this has to be worse. I’ve normalized my complete decay so thoroughly that I’m willing to show it off in public. That’s a bad thing, right?

And no, I have no idea where I got this spoon. My kitchenette has a hot plate and a microwave. It’s not the place for a fancy wooden spoon.

I’m beginning to think this foray into the real world was a mistake. In fact, I don’t want to be here so badly that my brain has blue-screened, meaning I can’t decide on an ice cream, and there’s this mom and her toddler heading my way. I’ve been hearing the little munchkin for some time now. She keeps saying bye to everything she passes. “Bye cereal.” “Bye tall man.” “Bye pink coat.” And look, I can stand the glaring. I can stand the unsaid insults. Yet this toddler’s impending narration of my slovenly state is more than I can handle. “Bye monster woman.” “Bye icky smell,” I imagine. I can only take so much.

So I grab a tub of something, anything, and sorta skip-shuffle down the aisle. It’s hard to hurry in slippers. I have half a mind to just ditch the dessert and return to my private shame as quickly as possible, but I’m here, the toddler’s too short to catch up, and I’m going to see this through, goddammit. 

As I sidle into a line, I pat my bathrobe pocket and am pleasantly surprised to see I had the forethought to bring a wallet. Wouldn’t that have been embarrassing.

The floor quakes. Just for a moment. I’m not drunk, and I don’t remember taking drugs, though I guess the not-remembering is part of the whole self-medicated equation. Either way, I’m damned sure the earth just moved. 

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The elderly woman in a hijab at the register glances up. A college kid nearby mumbles something to his partner who gives a tired shrug. So I didn’t imagine it. Maybe it was just a particularly rumbly loading truck.

A minute later, I stuff a stupidly long receipt into my pocket and head for the door, ice cream in hand. No bag. I’m not paying for that crap. I manage to fit the bottom half of the spoon in there too. Big pockets for the win.

On the way out, I pass the floor-to-ceiling windows. I don’t look, however I notice a bagger cartoonishly open-mouth gawping at whatever’s outside. It doesn’t really hit me to wonder about that until I’m out the door myself.

The automatic door swings open. I’m so consumed with how relieved I am to be leaving that I smash right into someone. 

“Shit, sorry,” I start to say, but the words die in my throat.

Again, I’m painfully sober. I know what I’m seeing is reality. I don’t have to pinch myself, I don’t wonder if it’s all a dream. I know the difference. I can feel the chilled wind, I can smell the superficially deodorized sweaty stench wafting up from my robe. This is real, it’s happening. Although it’s also, quite literally, impossible.

Everyone outside is frozen where they stand: the cart attendant, the woman in front of me, a couple loading groceries into the back of a minivan, me. The world has become so utterly incomprehensible that we’ve become paralyzed. We’re all just standing there. The only movement is the mess left behind by a dropped six pack, a clutter of cracked bottles spilling fizzy beer into the cracks in the pavement.

So what's got us bugged out like broken NPCs? Well, let me paint this picture for you. Usually, when you exit the supermarket, there’s a pair of guard rails, then a parking lot that stretches maybe twenty cars deep. To the left is a street that leads to an underpass, to the right a Home Depot. At the far end sits a couple of other stores: a Payless, a Caribou Coffee, and a sandwich shop that’s traded hands so many times that it’s hard to keep track. After that, you’ve got an obligatory copse of trees that at this point are still pretty bare from winter, and then the old brick apartment buildings begin. 

However, now it’s different. There’s the guard rails. And there’s about a third of a parking lot.

That’s all. 

A jagged line cuts across the lot and then there’s just sky. Hazy, dull blue, early morning sky. There’s nothing else. If this had been caused by an earthquake, there’d be a gap, and then the rest of the city would be on the other side. Instead there's… nothing. The world ends in a line of crumbled pavement with a bent light pole sticking out and a sedan teetering on the edge, ready to plummet off a cliff that has no right to be there.

The woman in front of me lets a grocery cart slip from her grasp. 

It's like a pin drop in a quiet theater. It's the only moving thing in the lot, and we all observe it with the keenest interest I've ever seen anyone put in a grocery cart. The wheels creak and whine as the rogue cart trundles away off the concrete curb and down the lot. Gaining speed, it sails past a trio of cars, jumps a bumpy lip of ragged pavement, and pitches off the edge into oblivion.

No one moves.

The automatic door swings open again, smacking me in the rear. Absentmindedly, I move aside as the mom with the toddler pulls up beside me. The little girl brandishes a floppy stuffed bunny from her seat on the grocery cart, oblivious to the physics-defying abyss. 

“Excuse me-” the mother says, but her voice dies too. She gasps and loses her grip on the cart.

No one moves again. The cart rolls down the lot, and we all just watch.

The toddler giggles from the cart's seat, “Byeeee stinky lady,” and disappears over the edge.