Code 21
by Wes Wightman

---She whizzed out the automatic doors on her shopping cart “fireman style” into the parking lot. The cart loaded with cases of canned beer and plastic wrapped cuts of cow meat. A little boy is sitting in the upper portion of the basket. Weeeeeeee Mommy- go! ---The getaway was nearly complete as she used her foot to slow the cart at the trunk of her older white Hyundai. ---A man screams - CODE TWENTY-ONE! CODE TWENTY-ONE! ---The store code for absconding with a cart of unpaid grocery items. ---Employees stream out of the store into the parking lot and rush to the woman, her cart, and scared child. A modified golf cart with flashing lights appears out of thin air. Her goods are seized. She is forcibly encouraged to return to the inside of the store. She pleads. Excuses and false explanations - she feigns ignorance. So much confusion. Everything is fast-forward. ---The boy may have fallen to the ground dead and been carried away by elves or quietly coaxed behind the swinging vinyl doors of the meat department and prepared into 99 cent ground chuck. He was gone. Mommy obviously really needed beef and beer. ---Earlier that day she woke slightly depressed and tried to slog through another day of life while she piped a constant stream of cartoon videotapes into the tender brain of the boy to keep him placated. ---For breakfast it was ramen, for lunch it was saltines and desperation, for supper - dreams of maybe earning her son a daddy and a man to pay the rent who does not like to hit. ---Later- 3 dollars in hand to buy more ramen and a quart of whole milk became an opportunity in a busy store for beer to numb and meat to nourish, with some fruit snacks and candy to say I love you to a lost boy. It was blurry. She had walked by the automatic doors three times with the cart half-full, and no one even looked. She knew all she had to do was take a few more steps, while looking nonchalant and distracted by a whiny kid and she was out. She would be free, and they could dine. ---She really didn’t even know how it got this far. Never that good in high school academics, she still had all the promise and hope of anyone. Dad was in the house, he worked a good welding job. Mom was ironically a supermarket checker back home in Ohio. ---Cheerleader, boyfriends, a used car at 16. Life should have been so standard and predictable - good even. Instead, pregnant from a liar at 18, and an impulsive and isolating move to Oregon, a lack of education, loneliness and no job skills. ---Now 21 with poor dental health and hungry with a kid. Meat sounded so good. So normal. She knew stealing was wrong but to steal a moment or a meal of normalcy, when everyone else was sitting down and eating meat and rice pilaf and scoops of ice cream did not seem wrong at all, it seemed fair. ---They pulled her behind closed doors. She was not embarrassed that nearly 100 people saw her lowest moment; yet she was mortified that it was her living this moment, that her previous 21 years of life as a person had took her to this point and dropped her off - face down tears running, son missing, alone with police en-route. ---Smug victory on the faces of grocery management and murmurs of how the maximum extent of the law would be pursued. In this, buried deep under the tears and loud talking and police arrival and handcuffs and foster care agencies - her tummy growled.

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