Shopping day. I headed off to Grant’s market this afternoon to pick up a few things. Grant’s is an Asian market in Mississauga I go to when I want some ingredients the No Frills simply doesn’t carry. I don’t know why they named their store after an American Civil War general, nor why they decided they needed his picture up on the sign beside an assortment of Chinese characters.

Grants was pretty busy, but they only had 2 cashiers open. I found myself in one of the line-ups, attempting to social distance, when they opened up an express lane. I only had 7 or 8 items so I thought I could move over there and save time. The fellow in front of me was only 2 people away from freedom so he motioned for me to go over to the express line. Just then a young woman crashed through our line. She was tiny, but she was loaded up with a few bulky items she was juggling in her arms. She realized I was heading over to the newly opened cash and she looked at me and said,”please….can I?!”, so I said, “OK, you go.” That’s when I realized another person was crashing through our line with the same idea. He was old, really old, with a cane and he too was juggling items. “OK, you go too!” There, my good deed for the day accomplished.

Now the guy in front of me had a large paper bag in a shopping basket. When he got up to the cash he took the bag from the basket and placed it on the conveyor. That’s when he realized his bag was leaking, so he attempted to tell the cashier about the leak but between them there was a language problem, and she chose to simply ignore the guy. Bad idea. She lifted up his big paper bag, and the bottom broke. Inside was a big plastic bag and in the big plastic bag, which of course was not closed up, there were several good-sized fresh mackerel from the fish room at the back of the store. Well mackerel went everywhere, flippin’ and a-floppin’ all over the conveyor. That’s not all, The bag also contained a healthy amount of that happy combination of fish blood and water and it went everywhere, all over her work station.

At that exact second, a woman entered the store. She seemed to be suffering from some kind of psychotic break. She was screaming at the top of her lungs in what I believe was Cantonese, and she stabbing her finger, pointing at random customers and employees, just out of her mind with mysterous rage. While this was going on, my cashier was cleaning up fish goo as best she could. Suddenly somebody else is yelling, and I think it’s her boss, screaming at her because she is cleaning up instead of cashing people out. I’m sure it boss-lady saw all the blood and goo all over everywhere, she would have been more sympathetic.

I pulled out my communicator and tried to reach Scotty to beam me up to the ship immediately, but he must have been having a problem with dilithium crystals because he left me there, on earth, in an Asian grocery store in Mississauga, stuck behind a macabre fish accident. Some days, it’s really best to stay home.