I couldn’t even tell him some fact like your eye color’s a mutation, a mistake of nature, and how the color of your skin depends on where you’re born as well as your family’s genetic makeup; Janey knew that stuff. Oh, and she’d go on and on about it, but I’d hardly listen. All I could do was leave the boy with what she left me with. “We just have one planet, sir.” He dropped the gun and let everybody go. They called me a “hero” that afternoon. But it wasn’t enough. One thought rested in my mind. Next Saturday, I’ll load two bullets.
The sign to the place read American Grocery, but to me it meant more, which was why there was a bloodbath, in that store on that day, the day the Georgia peach vanished from my life. There I was, standing in the store’s entryway, frozen. Here’s this store: one of the largest stores in my North Carolinian town. Far from my apartment. The sixth place I tried. The one store in Greenville that sold everything from alcohol, paper towels, to fruits, and vegetables. They had to have the one thing I wanted, a perfectly ripe Georgia peach. People came and went from my life, yet the peach had been there throughout. The one thing I could always depend on for peace of mind. I remember I watched one of the people I shot later point a customer to the peanut butter aisle from his ladder. He slicked his Elvis hairdo back as though he had the right to be cocky with his finger pointed left, even though the correct aisle was to the right. Prick didn’t even say which aisle either.