Bag Lady

by Bethany Browning

“You’ll notice that the DogHaüs is different than the Eau de Pupfume,” I said to the blinking couple in the Pet Palace popup shop at Crown & Hastings Market. I picked up the tester and gave it a light squeeze. They leaned into the cascade of mist and took a whiff.

“Bright citrus makes up the top note, supported by a base of cedarwood that peeps through during the dry down,” I continued. “Eau de Pupfume is a more pedestrian fragrance, not as nuanced.”

“I think Emoji is a DogHaüs boy,” the woman said, the words squeezing through her artificially filled lips. “Don’t you, Qiptyn?”

“The price, though, Bathory,” Qiptyn responded.

“But we’re dog people, Qiptyn.” Bathory’s vocal fry made the statement sound whinier than it was. “Emoji deserves the best.”

“What kind of dog is Emoji?” I asked. “Other than a very good boy?” This joke worked on everyone, every time.

Bathory didn’t crack a smile. “A scootidoodle?” Her uptalk confused me. I wasn’t sure if she was asking me or telling me. “He’s, like, a scooter and poodle and whatever?”

The words “that’s not a thing” shoved their way one by one into my mouth like billiard balls and I had to swallow hard to keep them from slipping out and bouncing all over the floor. Instead, I went with, “You don’t want Emoji to smell like a rescue, do you?” I added a disgusted shiver for effect.

I arranged my face into the blankest expression I could muster and silently counted to ten. This was both a selling tool—customers talk themselves into things when forced into an awkward silence—and a system of my own devising that kept me from spinning out into a rage-induced fugue state. This pair of medically enhanced morons were lavishing more gifts and attention on their dog than I, a full-blown human woman, had ever received from any person, place, institution, family member, or thing. The loathing I felt for them surged through my nervous system, an irritation so severe I feared I would break out in blisters all over my body.

But a bitch has to eat, so I waited with a benign expression for these four-star mega twats to decide whether they wanted their dog to smell like it either recently escaped a nursing home or is fresh to death for a night at the club. The dog perfumes were both equally nauseating, and that description? Google Fleurs de Magnifique. I memorized the copy from their website, and I have no clue what any of it means.

As ever, I sealed the deal and cleared a small commission—which is why I came to work at Crown & Hastings in the first place. It was the kind of place where dotcommers and trustifarians, trophy wives and retired artists could pick up their oat milks, pigeon eggs and coffee beans that had been shat out by a civet cat. But the new owners of Crown & Hastings tapped into the gentrification of the neighborhood, created a few popup shops for pets, floral and gifts, and let any employee earn a bit extra by upselling specialty items to the lofted gentry.

I was coming off a few challenging years as an environmental activist with the Climate Underground and I was ready to dip a toe into capitalism if it meant that I wouldn’t get pepper sprayed in the face again. Entitled assholes were part of the deal, which I accepted.

Until I couldn’t.

Mrs. Pringle wasn’t the kind of old lady anyone would notice. She was under five feet tall with a slightly rounded back. She dressed simply and comfortably. Her hair, a perfect silver helmet. Her reading glasses, tortoiseshell. She left a light breath of White Diamonds in her wake. She came in every day for this and that. A loaf of gluten-free bread. Baking soda toothpaste. And at the end of every transaction, she’d ask for a plastic bag to carry it home.

My blood churned every time I thought of it.

Crown & Hastings charged two dollars per plastic bag to discourage this idiotic practice—certainly enough to discourage a senior citizen on a fixed income. And we were trained, upon encountering any under-rock-dwellers who hadn’t got the memo about the environmental chaos caused by these petroleum-based menaces, to offer them a fifteen-dollar Crown & Hastings reusable tote made from fair trade hemp sewn by women in developing countries who used the funds to get their fistulas sewn up.

It was a great deal. I had three.

Such a great deal, that I offered to buy one for her.

“Plastic is fine,” she said.

My arm hair stood en pointe. Plastic. Is. Not. Fine. It will never be fine. In six million years, that bag that will still be blowing around. If it doesn’t get itself lodged in a porpoise’s blowhole first.

Every day this happened. And every day it made me long for the nights I spent loosening the screws on a fleet of knuckleboom loaders or standing waist-deep in sludge to protest a pipeline. I longed for the thrill of raising a hand-sewn flag with a slogan that stuck it to the man. I’d see her out of the corner of my eye, and, like a dog trained to salivate at a bell, my shoulders would cramp, my vision would narrow, and rage would boil in my belly. I could feel my pulse in my neck, and I had to stifle a powerful urge to choke something.

I lay awake at night envisioning the carnage each one of Mrs. Pringle’s bags was inflicting on the planet. Storm drains stuffed full of them. Bags entangled in deer antlers. Bags trapped in tree branches in our city parks, flapping in the wind like sad windsocks, a bellwether of human decline.

I was run down, defeated. I dreaded her visits. I winced when she appeared at my check stand, unable to make eye contact.

I rang up her tiny bottle of organic eyedrops and took one last stab.

“Mrs. Pringle, perhaps you’d be more comfortable with one of our reusable bags,” I said with a sigh that I hoped was passive-aggressive enough to get her on board. “My treat.”

The smile never left her face as she looked me dead in the eye and said, “Plastic is fine, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart? You’re looking at a social justice warrior, not your ickle darling. I dug my nails deep into the flesh of my palms to prevent the tirade that was fighting to issue forth from my throat. One deep breath. I relaxed. I handed her the bag and wished her a lovely evening.

She stopped to chat with my co-worker Jaxley. My eyes burned holes in the back of Mrs. Pringle’s pink cardigan.

And then, serendipity.

Jaxley waved me over and said they’d take the rest of my shift. It was a quiet evening, and they wanted to get home late anyway since their partner was moving out and they “didn’t need any more of that drama, my good god.”

Normally I would stand firm and fight for my shifts because, well, I was now as passionate about money as I once was about lobbing Molotov cocktails into truck dealerships. But this was such a fortuitous occurrence, any deeply attuned empath like myself would recognize it as a sign from Mother Gaia.

I raced out of Crown & Hastings, got a bead on Mrs. Pringle, and followed her home.

I was surprised to find she lived in one of the older apartments, a bit run down and dated. Clean, though, and moderately well maintained, especially compared to the place I lived. Outside stairs. No security. Plain. Kinda dumpy.

Ok so maybe I was wrong about her wealth. But I wasn’t wrong about her feckless stupidity.

She had to be stopped.

Sneaking up on her was laughably easy. She couldn’t hear worth a damn. She ascended the stairs slowly, thoughtfully.

She showed no signs of sensing my presence. When she opened the door, I gave her a small shove, just enough to tip her out of the way, and I slipped in right behind her.

A confused “Oh,” was the last sound Mrs. Pringle uttered.

I can still hear the brittle, crinkling sound of the bag as I tightened the handles around her throat, and the unmistakable desperation of the in-out-in-out sound, not of breath, but of thin, waterproof material pulsing inside her denture-studded maw.

Mrs. Pringle was so bird-like she wasn’t able to put up much of a fight. Her sad life was dispatched within moments, and when the tension left her body and she slumped to the parquet floor of her entryway with no more intensity than a small pile of laundry being dropped from waist high. I felt the sigh of a thousand spared shorebirds breeze through me. I heard the grateful glug-glug of a sea turtle, relived that its dinner of jellyfish wasn’t a man-made imposter. I pocketed the eye drops.

Those old Climate Underground feelings were paying me a visit. The smell of homemade explosives. A phantom pain in my wrists from a too-tight zip tie. Fingers sore from sewing flags.

My shoulders unclenched. My jaw clicked.

I took a beat to observe her apartment. In my mind’s eye it had been cluttered with thousands of plastic bags. Bags spilling out of drawers. Bags piled up next to the couch. Crown & Hastings bags re-used as bathroom trash liners. Bags as drapes. Bags filled with more bags.

Instead, I found a tidy home, with nary a speck of dust nor a pile of papers. Orderly. Prim. Not a bag in sight.

What did she do with them all?

No bags in the closet. No bags in the laundry room or under the bed.

My chest felt hollow, like I’d stumbled into a secret I shouldn’t know but couldn’t unsee. There was no explanation. A bag a day. Disappeared into thin air.

I left no fingerprints. There was no reason anyone would know I was here. I had done a service, and despite my uneasy feeling, I believed it was for the best.

Sleep was a wrestling match, and I wanted to call in sick. But my bills weren’t going to pay themselves, so I rousted myself, brushed my teeth and hair, and slouched my way to Crown & Hastings, determined to have a better day. Sell an orchid or two. Get some sucker to shell out a hundred bucks on repurposed chocolates.

Jaxley was crying so hard their goth makeup was streaming down their face and pooling in their suprasternal notch.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “What happened?”

“Mrs. Pringle died,” they said through hiccup-sobs.

“I— were you close?” A light breeze could have knocked me to my knees.

They nodded and wiped their nose, smearing their black lipstick in the process. “My third-grade teacher. She was a lovely person.”

I was frozen to my spot. I thought of my own third-grade, teacher Mrs. Stephens, who smelled like pumpkin pie and once told me that I was destined for great things. I’d be devastated if she— I couldn’t conceive of it.

My mouth tried to rationalize what my brain knew was wrong. “She did take a lot of plastic bags. Maybe the planet can take a small breather now that one polluter is gone.” Even I couldn’t believe I’d said that.

Jaxley stopped breathing. Their eyes, swollen from sobbing, narrowed. “She picked up litter,” they said through gritted teeth.

“Come again?” I asked. My spirit and my body separated in one quick swoosh. A splash of nausea made itself known deep in my gut, a sick, liquid feeling.

“Lit-ter,” Jaxley said, using their hands to emphasize the two syllables. “You know, the trash that people throw on the street?” They pushed their black bangs away from their forehead and crossed their arms as if to dare me to say anything else.

“She used— What?” Jaxley’s piercings swam before me.

“Since her husband died, she spent every afternoon walking the neighborhoods. She filled a bag a day. Starbucks cups, McDonald’s bags, needles. She even picked up dog shit. Other people’s dog shit.”

“I—I’m stunned.”

“She’d bring anything that could be recycled to me, I’d refund her money for the bag, and reuse it as a cat box liner.”

Jaxley’s revelations hit me like a cop’s baton. “I guess I didn’t know her—”

Jaxley leaned in so close I could see the ankh tattoo on the inside of their lower lip. “No. You fucking didn’t.”

They turned and whisked away, and the last I saw of Jaxley that day was the back of their dyed-black head as they went home “to mourn.”

I could feel the store clock ticking inside my bones, counting the minutes until I could scurry home to my hovel. My mind swam between justifying what I had done and feeling sorry for what I had done, to the point where I felt like I should probably bolt into traffic. But rent was still due, so I sold three boxes of chocolates that day, along with a membership in our Orchid-of-the-Month Club. Bathory and Qiptyn returned, in need of a leash that matched Emoji’s new sweater.

I had just the thing.

“This one comes with a poop bag dispenser,” I said. “See? You put a little roll of plastic bags in here, and it’s no muss, no fuss.”

Qiptyn and Bathory exchanged stifled smiles.

Numb but undaunted, I continued. “You put your hand inside the bag, pick up the poop and then turn it inside out. Keeps the parks and waterways free of disease and bacteria.” I thought of Mrs. Pringle and a chasm of remorse.

“Emoji’s so small,” Bathory whined. “He has his shots?”

“And it’s good fertilizer, am I right?” Qiptyn said in a jocular tone that made my teeth ache, like he knew something I didn’t. “We’ll take this other one. We don’t need the bags.”

“You just let your dog—” I snapped my mouth shut before I lost the sale. Images of Emoji shitting in public and these two stepping over the pile, leaving it for poor, hunched Mrs. Pringle, lit up my synapses, as if someone had launched a Roman candle in my brain.

My hands shook as I rang them up. I felt the familiar surge of fury in every heartbeat as I watched Bathory flip her hair on the way out of the automatic doors.

“Emoji,” I growled under my breath as my nostrils tingled with the scent of kerosene, my eyes watered from the memory of pepper spray, and my new plan unfurled before me like a home-sewn flag emblazoned with made-up acronyms.

Bethany Browning's work has been published in Stories We Tell After Midnight Volume 3, Allegory, Angel Rust, Drabbledark II, Mudroom, The Drabble, Flash Flood, Filth, The Sunlight Press, and Esoterica, with more coming this year in Sage Cigarettes and Flash Fiction Magazine. She's on Twitter @buzzwordsocial. Her website is bethanybrowning.com.