Top Choice
(Published in Jubilee City, 2005)

Mike got a call early one morning from this pain in the ass Steve dude he saw around art school.
Steve says 'man we’re broke and we don’t even have gas, can you take us to the store?'
What a chore Mike thought as he went to pick them up at the low rent married student housing just off campus.
It’s cold, dark and overcast as he waits at the curb in his baby blue pick-up. Soon they appear and they don’t look happy. She never does. She always looks like she’s in over her head.
He says he’s French but he looks like a musketeer wannabe with long thick curly black hair, and she was small and wispy almost with out pigment; not white but transparent.
Mike doesn’t really like them.
But he drives them to the Safeway supermarket that sits alone outside of town and waits for them in the parking lot.
Soon they are back inside the truck slamming the door and Steve urgently says 'get out of here.'
Mike doesn’t need to hear that twice.
They are rolling and Mike asks 'where are the groceries?'
Steve looks behind them and pulls out from under his dark corduroy coat a monster size piece of red meat staining its cellophane and overflowing it’s Styrofoam and smiles at it.
As we roll we both look at her frightened face.
'Well?' Steve says.
She pulled from under her tan corduroy sheepherder jacket (that’s his) a thin slice of pale lame ham wrapped in bagging cellophane and framed by an over-sized Styrofoam tray.
The price was well under a dollar.
As if shocked by electricity he spazzed and yelled
'You don’t steal the shittiest thing!'