SaveMart’s fluorescent lights had a way of making everything look vaguely ill—not horror movie sick, just exhausted, like the building had been awake too long and forgotten what it felt like to blink. I stood in checkout lane four on a Thursday evening with a cart full of the most aggressively ordinary groceries a single man in his thirties could buy: chicken breast, broccoli, pasta, a jar of marinara sauce, bananas with browned edges that had been discounted like they were begging someone to love them before they went soft. A six-pack of beer I didn’t even want sat at the bottom of the cart—I just wanted something cold in my hand while I stared at Netflix and pretended I wasn’t thinking about my life.
I’d been in Milbrook, Vermont for three months, and “ordinary” was the entire point. Milbrook was the kind of town that put maple leaves on street signs in October, where the downtown looked like someone had taken a postcard and decided to build it in real life. Tourists came for syrup season and leaf-peeping, stayed to buy flannel and drink coffee that tasted like burnt hope.
The town had exactly one stoplight, two churches, and a diner that served breakfast all day because apparently that was a personality trait here. I had chosen boring on purpose. Boring meant safe.
Boring meant invisible. Boring meant nobody asked questions about why a software developer from Seattle had suddenly appeared in rural Vermont with no job lined up and a rental lease paid six months in advance. The cashier was a woman in her fifties with graying hair pulled into a tight bun that made her cheekbones look sharp enough to cut.
Her name tag said ROSA in block letters scratched by years of shifting plastic and scanning barcodes. I’d never seen her before, but that wasn’t unusual—SaveMart’s staff rotated like the weather, faces appearing and disappearing with the kind of turnover that suggested either terrible management or terrible wages. Probably both.
She grabbed the pasta first, ran it across the scanner, and the machine chirped in that bright, cheerful way that always felt vaguely insulting. Like, congratulations, you are purchasing carbohydrates, life is fine! Rosa didn’t look fine.
Her hands moved mechanically—pure muscle memory—but her eyes locked onto mine with an intensity that made the back of my neck prickle with primitive warning. Then she said it, flat and quiet, like she was reading the weather forecast. “This is your last meal.
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