The neatly-stacked cans of “Ida’s Meal-In-A-Minute
Homemade Chicken Tenders and Rice,” which were neither Ida’s nor homemade but did,
in fact, heat up in one minute, collapsed from the rush of the oncoming steel,
loudly crashing onto the tile; aluminum road kill as far as the eye could see.
Carrie sunk to the floor, releasing a torrent of
tears as twin toddlers Joseph and James, still strapped into the offending
shopping cart, looked on in shock, silent for the first time that day, and busy
shoppers stepped around her, avoiding eye-contact lest they, too, be sucked
into her vortex of hell.
Her thumb still throbbed from the deep slice it
had taken cutting up fruit for the kids’ breakfast that morning, and then backing out of the driveway while trying to get Joseph to release his death grip
on James’ hair in the rear seat, she had stepped on the gas instead of the brake, shooting across the street, over the curb
and into her neighbor’s newly-sod front lawn.
The last thing Carrie recalled before awakening in
the psych ward was looking up at an orthodonically-challenged, trembling teenage
boy with a name tag that read “Hi-I’m-Bobby-Have-A-Nice-Day” and the booming
voice from the in-store sound system:
“Clean-up on aisle seven.”
From the
Five Sentence Fiction prompt “accident.”
