all the kooks
by Ace Boggess
The fight started right in front of her in the pasta aisle. Mary Ellen wasn’t close enough to hear if words had been exchanged. She saw the older man in the Harley Davidson face and neck covering and matching tee lunge over the other man’s cart and tackle him into the hard, metal shelves. Boxes fell everywhere, rigatoni and macaroni noodles scattering in a bomb-blast pattern, as though the aftermath of a kindergarten art project. The younger man wore blue and gold apparel and a hat with a flag on it, but no mask, so Mary Ellen could guess what caused the dispute. Everything was political, even the act of picking out linguini.
She didn’t stay to witness what happened next because there might be blood and breath and sweat—all things she hoped to avoid. The virus could be in any of those, and she wanted to get away from them as quickly as possible, resisting her human urge to rubberneck at tragedy. Pulling a Uie—a difficult maneuver with her cart weighed down by enough groceries to feed ten families—she exited the aisle, clumsily dodging Kroger’s staffers and onlookers rushing toward the show. She heard a less-than-manly shriek from behind her but didn’t turn to see which man had gotten his ear bitten off or who had split his head open on a shelf.
Mary Ellen hated grocery shopping in the best of times but now came here at least three times a week, stocking up for four people: herself; her grandmother, pushing eighty; her mom, who had the existing preconditions of recent cancer treatment and a forty-year smoking habit; and her sister Magdalena, who was on home confinement and, technically, could do her own grocery shopping, though everyone agreed it would be best if she didn’t have that as an excuse to meet up with one of her dealers. Mary Ellen earned the task by being the rational sister, the responsible one, and by becoming unemployed after the Governor’s stay-at-home order forced her coffee-and-pastries shop to close. Brew-Baker’s had been open in Charleston for about six months when the pandemic hit. It was out of the way on Fife Street, and it didn’t have time to build a supportive clientele. Even Mary Ellen’s tasty macaroons and multi-jellied Danishes weren’t enough to save it. Now, she lived off the charity of her mother and grandmother.
Pushing her rolling tank of a buggy away from the fracas, Mary Ellen decided she had had enough for one day. Pasta noodles were out, so she could skip the sauces and spices, too. That just left frozen foods, which she figured could wait for another day, and cleaning supplies she had little hope of finding on the store’s empty shelves. She chose the shortest long line and eased her cart into place, prepared to wait it out as the slowest clerk in the world scanned every two-liter bottle of pop in a man’s oddly indulgent buggy.
“Nice mask.”
Mary Ellen turned to see a young, muscular woman with short white hair moving into place six feet behind her. They both wore the same, fitted rainbow mask. “Thanks,” said Mary Ellen, smiling even though the other woman couldn’t see it. “You, too.”
“Can you believe this shit?” the woman said, and though her mouth was hidden, her eyes expressed rage and contempt, contorting the way a stand-up comic might during a particularly nasty joke.
Mary Elen shook her head. “Two assholes got in a fight in the noodle aisle.”
“That’s insane. I heard the commotion but didn’t know what happened.”
“It was … indecent,” Mary Ellen said, thinking but not needing to add, the way men are.
The white-haired woman said something ugly about West Virginia, but it came through muffled by the mask and muted beneath the noise of the store.
Mary Ellen nodded, despite not being sure what she was agreeing to. Then she turned and waited to unload her groceries onto whatever tiny space of conveyer belt opened up. In better times, she might have chatted more or gotten the woman’s name and number. Now, though, the slightest human interaction felt like chewing on glass. She followed the unwritten rules of the pandemic, keeping her eyes forward, hoping to exit the store promptly and without infection.
*****
She remembered the day her bakery opened. What a joyous event. When she unlocked that smoked-glass door for the first time, she found a dozen people standing outside, including a young brunette reporter from WSAZ and a six-foot-tall cameraman. Mary Ellen gave everyone a free cupcake from her first batch: chocolate with billowing waves of silver and gold icing, candy stars, and in the center, a miniature plastic bottle holding a splash of champagne. She ate one, too—best cupcake she ever tasted, she decided—following it with that sip of sparkling wine. She thought about how her sister would’ve loved to have tried one, but Magdalena was fresh out of rehab, and even a few drops of wine seemed like a bad idea.
“Oh, my god,” the reporter said, realizing she was about to go on camera with silver icing on her chin. She grabbed a wad of cocktail napkins and dabbed madly at the mess.
The cameraman said, “I wasn’t going to say anything.”
Mary Ellen laughed. The other patrons laughed. The reporter scowled, turning that into a grin. Everyone seemed happy. A good day. No, a great day with a promise of more to come.
No one knew about the virus yet. There were rumblings about a sickness overseas. The usual place. No cause for worry. It would pass. They almost always did.
*****
The humidity in the store had gotten to her, left her angry and feeling unclean where she sweated through her mask, leaving an oily O around her lips. She imagined her curly, brown hair frizzing in all directions as if to build a sort of virus catcher. Her tortoise-shell glasses had fogged and cleared so many times she imagined that was what it would be like to be suffocated with a plastic bag.
She pushed the buggy with her left hand, holding her keys and her mom’s credit card in her right. She maneuvered the heavy cart roughly around dawdling customers and a teenage Kroger’s employee waving his arms about and wearing his mask below his nostrils. She might as well be pushing a boulder up a hill, she thought, but unlike Sisyphus, she could be crushed by this rock if it rolled back downhill.
As soon as she made it through both sets of sliding exit doors, Mary Ellen grabbed for her mask, pulling it off so frantically that she almost unseated her glasses, which clicked against the keys in her hand. She gasped, sighed, gasped again, sucking in the steamy late-April air. She decided then that if this pandemic went on much longer, she fully intended to lose her fucking mind.
As she stood there, slumping against her buggy for support and trying to remember what it was like to breathe, she saw an older man in a dressy white button-up and faded jeans leaning back against a silver Ford truck parked in the fire lane. He had bushy white eyebrows and a crescent of gray-brown hair. His face looked like a full moon with two meteor-strike dust clouds rising from the surface. Mary Ellen wouldn’t have paid attention to any of that if it weren’t for the wooden sign affixed to the roof of the man’s truck. It had been painted white, except for the word JESUS in red letters and a fiery arrow pointing straight ahead.
What was that supposed to mean? she wondered. Follow me to Jesus? Or maybe, Hey, look, there’s Jesus over there. Was Jesus in the blue BMW parked ten feet away? Or could it be that Jesus, now vanished, had been standing nearby before walking through Kroger’s entrance doors.
This pandemic has brought out all the kooks, she thought, meaning the old guy with the sign, not Jesus, who clearly wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
The man slowly lifted his head, met her gaze, and smiled.
Hell, she thought. I’ve made eye contact. She expected the man would try to talk to her now, offer her a pamphlet, sing a hymn about some old, rugged cross, or find no good in her and shout a few unkind words about damnation.
Looking away, Mary Ellen shoved the mask and her mom’s credit card in her pocket. She had stopped carrying a purse when she went out, figuring there’d be no way to know what particles it might pick up in a crowded store.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement. Was the man walking toward her? Would a confrontation be inevitable? She didn’t plan to stick around and find out. Giving her cart a hard shove, she rolled it through the fire lane, gaining speed as she rushed toward her silver Kia.
*****
When Magdalena failed a drug screen and violated her probation, the pandemic raged in most of the country. The national news provided updates on jails and prisons in places like Chicago, where outbreaks among inmates laid the population low. That hadn’t happened in West Virginia jails yet, but Mary Ellen knew it would. She dreaded the thought of her sister handcuffed and dragged off to the Regional Jail out on Corridor G near the Walmart. If one guard or inmate caught the disease, all would have it. She didn’t want her sister to be one among the many, a statistic, another blindfolded prisoner waiting for the virus to yell Fire!
She had no way to prevent it, though. She couldn’t so much as visit Magdalena because of the state’s intense pandemic restrictions. All she could do was sit around and wait for her sister’s collect call from inside.
“Mags, you okay?”
“Holding up.”
“What’s this about?”
“I fucked up.” She said Henry, her ex, showed up with half a gram of meth in a stamp baggie. She let him fuck her, regretted it, took the baggie, and now regretted that, too. “It was stupid. I was stupid. I hope the judge doesn’t revoke me.” She said she had a Skype hearing scheduled for Monday. She thought that, because of the virus, Judge Blatt might give her another chance.
Mary Ellen wasn’t so sure. Judge Blatt seemed like the type of guy who would’ve been educated at the same school of pricks as Magdalena’s ex. Both spoke the language of power as though they could do whatever they wanted to anyone. “What if they don’t let you out, Mags?”
“I don’t know.”
“Now’s not a good time to be in jail.”
Magdalena sighed loudly over the static of the phone line. “Honey, never’s a good time to be in jail.”
“The virus…,” said Mary Ellen.
“That’s scary, but you don’t know what it’s like in here. Last time I was in here, I saw a lady bite into another lady’s tit during a fight.”
Mary Ellen cringed. “Sorry,” she said. “Well, hopefully Blatt will cut you a break.”
“Good Lord willing,” said Magdalena, not because she believed it, but because it was something their mom always said.
Three days later, Judge Blatt reinstated her probation, though with the added restriction of six months on home confinement. She wore an ankle bracelet and had to check in with a Sheriff’s deputy once a month in addition to her probation officer. She’d be taking drug tests every other week until the end of October.
*****
As quickly as she could, Mary Ellen transferred thirty plastic Kroger’s bags into the trunk of her Kia. The space was full and barely held everything, looking like someone packed it with a payload of wet sand. She slammed the lid, making sure it latched, then pushed her cart to a buggy island. On her way back, she saw the old guy’s truck pull into the row and head toward her. She could tell it was his by the triangle of white wood on top, the arrow of its JESUS sign, she realized, now aimed straight at her.
The man stuck an arm out his window and waved at her, simultaneously honking the horn with his other hand.
People walking through the lot turned their heads, saw the sign, then turned again to where it pointed.
“Jesus,” said Mary Ellen, not referring to the sign. She pushed a button on her key fob, unlocking the car door. Slipping into the vehicle, she started the engine and, not bothering with her seatbelt, put the vehicle in reverse, backing recklessly out of her spot as though she had committed a crime and was fleeing the scene.
She checked the rearview mirror. The man’s truck was right behind her, headlights flashing, horn honking, arrow pointing.
She wondered if maybe that lunatic thought she was Jesus and he had found her after all this time, like in one of those poorly-worded obituaries where someone “went to be with the Lord at Charleston General Hospital,” a euphemism for dying that left the impression Jesus had been waiting there all along, maybe hanging out in the smoking area or eating powdered eggs in the cafeteria. She laughed at the thought, then winced, remembering this man thought that same Good Lord was her.
Mary Ellen pulled forward, and the old man followed. She turned left, and the JESUS truck went left as well. What does he want? she wondered, turning right and heading for the main road, the Ford still close behind.
*****
Magdalena and Mary Ellen had much different relationships with their mother. Mary Ellen thought of her as loving and generous, helping out financially with college, an apartment after, a few unexpected expenses with the business, and now the broken heart of unemployment. The two could talk about TV shows or politics, deaths in the family, or the sad state of the world, always with smiles, laughter, a sense of shared triumph at fighting against how America treated women trying to make it without men in their lives. Mary Ellen had come out to her mom during junior year and found a sort of acceptance there. “I don’t understand it,” her mom said, “but we’ll drink to it. At least I don’t have to worry about you getting knocked up and marrying some dumbass like your dad.” And drink they did, the two of them tipping martinis as if they were best friends on a lunch date.
For Magdalena, childhood passed in an onslaught of criticism and denial. Her clothes never fit and wore out too quickly, facts her mother pointed out over and over. Likewise, her hair was too frizzy and full of tangles until she cut it off at sixteen, earning a whole new set of hassles.
“My daddy would’ve licked me with a switch and made me pick it out myself,” her mother chided.
Her boyfriends were never good enough.
“Careful not to make any mistakes with that one. Don’t want to be shackled to that steaming mess.”
The first time she drove the minivan, she dented a fender and cracked a taillight.
“You’re just like your dad: not much good at anything.”
Once, in high school, Magdalena won an award for best essay in a statewide history competition. She had written about former Governor Glasscock who, aside from having a name that made kids giggle, was known for repeatedly sending troops to break up battles between miners and armed guards in the coal-mine wars.
Her mom didn’t offer congratulations. “Do you get any money for that?” she asked, a question she’d use throughout her youngest daughter’s life.
*****
She gunned her Kia, hoping she could beat the light and leave the Jesus guy behind, but a woman driving a Prius made a hard stop in front of her. Mary Ellen jammed the brake pedal to prevent a collision. “Not one thing, it’s another,” she said, cussing without letting herself hear the words.
What was she supposed to do now? She had planned to drive to the police station, but it had moved a few years back. She made it several blocks before she realized she was heading for the old building and couldn’t remember where to find the new.
“Call the cops,” she muttered, reaching down behind herself to dig her cellphone out of her back pocket. It snagged on the seatbelt, slipping from her hand. The Otter Box clunked against the transaxle and pinballed down beneath her seat. “Shit.”
Checking her rearview, she saw the truck nearing, the triangle on top like a third eye or a cannon, as though it could either see into her or destroy her. For a second, she couldn’t breathe. Her head went swimmy, the car fading around her. She pressed harder on the brake pedal, which now felt insubstantial, then forced herself to inhale. The air burned going down, but sensation came back to her head and hands.
Was that a panic attack? she wondered. High blood pressure? Oh, God, she thought, I’ve got the virus.
The truck had moved into the passing lane beside her. Though the light had turned green, both vehicles were stopped.
Mary Ellen turned her head and saw the guy twirling his finger in the ancient gesture that indicated he wanted her to roll down her window. Sunlight sharpened the truck’s cab and gave the man a glow as if he were someone holy in a Baroque painting. His crescent of hair burned golden candles. He motioned again with one finger in a horizontal loop that made it look like he was doing a magic trick.
She stared, ensorcelled by the man’s uncanny halo. Her hand, as if acting on its own, reached for the button that slid the window down. Her mouth dangled open, but she didn’t speak.
The man did another trick, a blue rectangle of plastic rising from his thumb and index finger. “I saw you drop this,” he said. “Thought you might want it back.”
A horn blared from one of the cars trapped behind the two vehicles. Another immediately followed.
Mary Ellen patted at her pants pocket, feeling only the bulge of her wadded mask. “My mother’s credit card,” she said. “She would’ve killed me.” As soon as the words passed her lips, she knew they weren’t true.
*****
Growing up, Mary Ellen didn’t notice how differently her mother treated Magdalena. Or maybe she did, but she thought it normal for one kid to be the good kid and the other the bad. Now that she and her sister spoke regularly, she recognized the distinctions: how her mother applauded her for a C+ in biology, then a year later scolded Magdalena for a B-; how her mom would fix Mary Ellen a grilled-cheese sandwich after school, but then if Magdalena asked for one, she’d say, “You know where the kitchen is.”
Magdalena spoke of their mom often when Mary Ellen stopped by with groceries or burgers in a takeout sack. “She wouldn’t even bail me out, Mare. First time I got arrested, it was just a misdemeanor possession charge. She left me sitting there in hell for a month until you finally got hold of Dad down in Florida and had him wire you the money. You think she’d have done that to you?”
“No,” said Mary Ellen, “I don’t think she would.”
“She’s hated me since I was born, Mare.”
Mary Ellen wouldn’t call it hate. Now that she could see it, it made sense to her. Their mother was troubled, off, broken inside by something the two sisters might never understand. It was as though she had two entirely separate personalities—one generous, one corrosive—and with two daughters, that allowed her to give full voice to each.
Photo of Ace Boggess
BIO: Ace Boggess is author of seven books of poetry, most recently Tell Us How to Live (Fernwood Press, 2025) and My Pandemic / Gratitude List (Mōtus Audāx Press, 2025). His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Hanging Loose, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes, watches Criterion films, and tries to stay out of trouble. His first short-story collection Always One Mistake is forthcoming from Running Wild Press.