Five and a half hours after he found out he was dying, Heron drove to his favorite supermarket. In the absence of an alternative, and because it was a Thursday, he decided to stick to his routine.
It is no secret that Heron likes to do his weekly food shop on a Thursday. In the evening, if at all possible, late afternoon at the earliest. His family teases him about it, his strange inflexibilities.
“Live a little,” his daughter had said last week. “Go shopping on a Monday morning, I dare you.”
But Thursdays are quiet and that suits him. Thursdays are sensible. Heron likes to start the weekend with a full fridge, although his weekends are, in truth, much like any other day of the week now.
At the top of the escalator he finds a small shopping cart; a perfect compromise, he has always thought, since a big cart is really too much, a basket not quite enough. Heron is an organized shopper, placing each item into the reusable bag he has labeled for its corresponding kitchen cupboard. He keeps the cleaning products separate from the bread. He doesn’t rush, or forget the milk, or squash the salad. Heron isn’t one of those people who minds when they change the layout of the supermarket from time to time. If anything, he sort of enjoys it, the hint of scavenger hunt it gives to tracking down the thin-cut marmalade. He could not say, if asked, why he shops in this particular way, the system speaks for itself.
Heron pushes his small cart to the farthest, coldest corner of the supermarket. For obvious reasons, frozen foods are always selected last. Today, in a significant break from routine, he slides open the glass lid of a waist-high chest freezer, flattens out the bags of potato smiley faces, and climbs inside.
It is the smell rather than the cold he notices first. Even with the lid slightly open, the air inside the freezer is stale and starchy. He is as surprised as anyone to find it is actually quite comfortable inside a chest freezer, even with the frost starting to soak through at the backs of his knees. Heron adjusts his shoulder blades, stretches out his legs, and the frozen potato faces settle beneath him. He lies still in the muffled peace of the chest freezer, and he lives.
