Let me tell you a story about High Street

A flash fiction, by Paul Corman-Roberts, follows a narrator who walks with new aspirations and ends up filling a plastic shopping bag with other, older realities, seems to find a shared middle ground.

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Let me tell you a story. Ten thousand steps are a negotiation, to reverse habits, to raise the vibration of the heart.

Still, it’s eighty degrees out in late March, and I’m on step six thousand without water. My next stop: The High Street Liquor store in Alameda, an honest to God Oakland style liquor store in the middle of an affluent residential enclave.

Walking into a cool, poorly lit establishment, an older white woman in a wheelchair buys a bag full of things, gets prices on cigs and lottery tickets, and goes on about how nice Muslim people are.

I am here for my own bag. I should purchase water; instead my hand grabs the mocha flavored shot for one bad habit, and then a lighter at the counter for another.

My bad habits are loaded into my own bag. I say thank you to the Sikh cashier who hopes her daughter, expertly working the iPad nearby, isn’t paying attention to the customers.

Sunlight blinds me as I spill onto the sidewalk. I nearly crash into the wheelchair woman as she brings a freshly lit Newport to her lips.

I give her a head nod, which she doesn’t return, but as I pass, her gravelly voice rasps out: I ain’t been marr’d in thirty years.

Launching into my last four thousand steps I have to smile because I know she was saying she hadn’t been married in thirty years. But it came out as “marred.” And I’m thinking either way, she’s not wrong.

© Paul Corman-Roberts

Short Summary: This was during quarantine and I was caught up in the 10k steps fad. Sometimes when you do silly things for yourself, you catch stories like this.