by Sarp Sozdinler
I went to the grocery store because I wanted cereal, and also because I wanted to leave my apartment for a reason that sounded more respectable than I needed to leave my apartment. I bought cereal, dish soap, frozen peas, a loaf of bread, and one lemon. I don’t know why I bought one lemon. It felt like the right thing to do at the time. The cashier asked if I wanted my receipt. I said no. Then I said yes. Then I said actually no, you know what, forget it. She looked at me for a moment and printed the receipt anyway and put it in the bag without saying anything. I drove home and carried the bags inside. The plastic handles cut into my fingers. The loaf of bread fell out onto the sidewalk, but it was still in the plastic so I decided that was fine. I put everything away except the lemon, which I left on the counter because I kept forgetting I have lemons.
Later that night I wanted to know how much the cereal had cost. I looked through the bag for the receipt but the receipt wasn’t there. I looked on the counter. I looked in the bread bag, for some reason. I checked my bank app but it only showed the total, which I already knew, because the total had been bad. I went out to the car with my phone flashlight and looked between the seats. I found two pens, a hard french fry, a guitar pick, and the title to the car in an envelope I had been meaning to deal with for maybe two years. I couldn’t find the receipt. I sat in the driver’s seat in the dark and thought about how the cashier had definitely put the receipt in the bag. I tried to remember watching her do it. I thought maybe I had thrown it away involuntarily, out of habit. I thought maybe my body made decisions my mind wasn’t included in every now and again. I went back upstairs and checked the kitchen trash. There was coffee sludge, peas I’d spilled and then swept off the counter with my hand, and the cardboard sleeve from the frozen pizza I ate for lunch. Still no receipt.
The next morning the lemon was gone. I stood in the kitchen and looked at the place where it had been. I looked around like maybe it had rolled somewhere while I was asleep. I checked the floor. I checked the fruit bowl, which strangely had one garlic in it. I checked the refrigerator, even though I knew I didn’t put the lemon in there. I started to think maybe I was mixing up days and had never bought a lemon in the first place. I remembered placing it on the conveyor belt after the dish soap because I didn’t want lemon chemicals from the lemon getting on the bread. I still don’t know if lemon chemicals are real. They seem real. I found the grocery bag in the trash and looked into the emptiness of it. I became convinced that the receipt incident and the lemon incident were somehow related.
I drove back to the grocery store. I didn’t really have a plan. I went to customer service and said I had a weird question. The woman at customer service said okay in a way that suggested she had already heard what I would say many times before. I told her I’d shopped there the night before and lost my receipt and also a lemon had gone missing from my kitchen. She asked if I wanted a duplicate receipt. I said probably, yeah. She asked if I knew the time of the transaction. I said approximately. She asked if I had the card I used. I handed it to her. She typed something in her computer for a while and then printed something out. She handed me the duplicate receipt. I looked at it. There was no lemon on it.
I said that’s strange because I remember that I’d definitely bought a lemon. She said then you probably didn’t. I said no, I definitely did. She said then it would be on the receipt. I said unless the receipt was incomplete somehow. She said receipts are usually pretty committed to their thing. I looked at the receipt again. Cereal, dish soap, peas, bread. No lemon. The total was lower than I remembered, which I didn’t like, because it suggested the receipt might be right. And that I might be wrong. I asked if anyone had found a stray lemon. She said where. I said I don’t know, maybe near the registers. She looked at me for a while, then looked past me and said, next guest please, even though I was still there and no one was behind me.
I drove home feeling like I had been slightly inconvenienced. What’s worse was when I went back in the apartment the lemon was on the counter exactly where I’d left it. Beside it was the receipt. Not the duplicate receipt from customer service. The original receipt, folded once. I unfolded it. The lemon was on there. One lemon. 0.89. I looked at the counter, the lemon, the receipt, my own hand holding the receipt. I thought about calling someone (Mom, a therapist, the grocery store representative), though I didn’t know what I would say. I thought about taking a picture, but I couldn’t decide if a picture of the lemon or a picture of the receipt would make more sense. They both could look pretty normal in a picture. I picked the lemon up. It felt cold in my hand. Not refrigerator cold. More like outside at night cold. I put it back down on the counter.
I ate a bowl of cereal. I kept looking at the lemon while I ate. The cereal tasted a little like dish soap. When I finished, I went to pick up the receipt. I folded it into a ball in my palm and uncrumpled it to put it in my wallet. I put the lemon in the freezer. It just seemed safer somehow.
Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Wigleaf, HAD, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, and Pithead Chapel, among other journals. He edits the literary journal The Bulb Region.