Jenny Hart

The shopping list says bears. I wonder if it’s a typo and Georgia meant to text pears. On the one hand, the letters p and b are quite distant on the keyboard, so it seems unlikely it’s a mistake. Georgia’s fingers are long and elegant with French polished nails. Mine are stumpy, chipped and bitten to the quick. On the other hand, she is inordinately fond of firm fruit. There’s none on the list, not even apples, so I assume we have lots left over in the fridge. Out of sight, out of mind. I prefer soft fruits. Raspberries and blueberries and over ripe blackberries. The kind that stains your mouth. I have no concerns about people knowing what I’ve been eating. 

I skulk through the discount supermarket at the end of our road. It has central aisles stacked with low-cost seasonal products. Hardware, clothing, kitchen goods. Christmas, summer holidays, back to school.  Go in for a pint of milk, come home with thermal ski-ware and a document shredder, as the saying goes. Unless I just made that up. I am still disconcerted by the instruction to purchase a bear. It may be affecting my mind.

As luck would have it, there are bears in the middle aisle today. Quite a variety. Polar bears, grizzly bears. Even koala bears, though strictly they’re marsupials.  Not Ursidae. An entirely different taxonomic family altogether. I try to text Georgia to ask her which sort she wants, but the Kodiak knocks my phone from my hand as it swipes the trout fillets I was going to cook for tea. Dinner, Georgia calls it. Apparently calling the evening meal tea is northern and parochial. She forgets I grew up in London and, unlike her, know the difference between afternoon tea and high tea. Sometimes I wonder why I love her. Or if she loves me at all. 

I crawl beneath the racking to recover my phone, skirt catching under my knees. I worry the bears might mistake my buttocks for small hard honeydew melons. I’m wearing tights, but they are thin and stretched to their limits. My phone is an arm’s length away, the light from its screen making this under-supermarket-world into a luminescent cavern. It feels safe here, with the comforting smell of pine floor polish and forgotten corners of dust. I lie on my belly, twisting my neck to look up through the racking at the specials as the bears move amongst the shoppers, biting off heads and stealing pucker-skinned chickens from abandoned trolleys. 

There’s less screaming than I expected. I guess it’s very British to not make a fuss. There’s a gurgle and a splutter and a clatter as a walking stick falls near my feet. As I slide it towards me with my foot, it drags a fir-tree pattern through a bulging puddle of blood. I use the stick to hook my phone and text Georgia to double check her spelling. She won’t answer me straight away. She isn’t that angry with me. She’s leave it ten minutes angry. I’m tempted to not buy her any pears or bears or anything. No apples or mangos or dragon fruit. Then she might be angry enough to kick me out. After all, as she is fond of reminding me, it’s her house. 

An alarm goes off, letting us know something high value is being stolen, or a basket is being taken out of the store. It wallops through the air and the growling of the bears pauses. Their feet splat down the aisle as they drag gas barbeques and bodies and multipacks of deluxe crisps towards the checkout. Georgia still hasn’t cleared up the misunderstanding nor expressed a preference regarding bears. I’m tempted to pick up a Panda just in case. I think it’s a fair hedge. It is the right family, but probably the wrong genus. I would struggle to get it home, herding it down the one-way system. So, I leave it.

The green light is on at tills three and seven, but the cashiers are nowhere to be seen. I stand with my loyalty app ready to scan. Georgia texts me back. 

Pears of course. But I’ve found some in the fridge so don’t bother.

Jenny Hart is a writer from England whose short fiction has appeared in ‘Urban Pigs’, ‘Frazzled Lit’ and ‘Cast of Wonders’. She lives across the road from a cemetery, with her two cats, Jason and Jeff. You can follow Jenny on Instagram, Bluesky and Twitter/X using @JennyHart2001

Read more from Jenny:

Frazzled Lit – ‘One Thousand Origami Cranes on Neptune’
Urban Pigs – ‘Old Bones’