of baggy overalls, a striped wool sweater, and a baseball cap worn backward. Geek was dressed in a pair of green tights and a matching leotard, and for such a large, round-seeming man, he had legs that were surprisingly thin. Over this he wore a burlap contraption, held up by suspenders, which looked like a giant diaper. He checked his watch, then nodded at Charmey.
“Allons,” she said, grabbing Frankie’s hand.
By 1130 they had infiltrated the target and were pushing shopping carts up and down the aisles, filling them with tomatoes, squash, jars of baby food, canned corn, bottles of canola oil, miscellaneous snack-food products, and ten-pound bags of potatoes. They all had a supply of leaflets in the child’s seat of their carts.
At 1207 Lilith asked to see the manager and was told he had just left for lunch.
By 1212 this information was relayed from Aisle 1: Fresh Produce through to Aisle 7: Cleaning Products & Picnicware, and the operatives headed toward the checkout lanes. A quick reconnoiter revealed a healthy target demographic—mothers with infants, preschool toddlers, and some early-elementary-school children, too.
By 1223 all operatives were engaged with the checkout personnel or closing in on the front of their lanes.
Y initiated the action in Lane 5.
“Hey,” he said in a friendly voice, squinting down at the name badge on the breast of his cashier. “Shawna?”
“Huh?” she said. She barely lifted her head.
Frank watched from Lane 3. He was worried. The cashier’s streaked hair was held off her face by an enormous plastic claw, and her two-toned lips were heavily lined in dark brown pencil. Frank had gone out with Shawna once, back in junior high. He knew for sure that she had no consciousness. On their date she had barely even been conscious.
“Shawna,” Y repeated with a smile. “That’s a nice name.”
She blinked and froze. Her fingernails, laminated with green sparkly polish in keeping with the pre-Christmas season, hung in midair above the conveyor belt of oncoming groceries. Her eyes were blank. Frank shook his head. Shawna was a frigid bitch. Hadn’t even let him kiss her. This was not going to work.
But he was wrong. He had underestimated Y’s charm. It took a minute, but by 1225 three things had fully dawned on Shawna: that Y was a cute, hip, older guy; that he was probably not from Ashtabula; and that he was attempting to have a conversation with her.
It was like someone had flipped a switch.
“Thanks,” she said, smiling and running her tongue under her upper lip to keep it from sticking to her teeth. She tossed her hair. The conveyer belt delivered a ten-pound bag of bakers. As she dragged it across the glass surface of the bar-code reader, Y took her hand.
“Hey, great nails,” he said. “Listen, before you ring that up, I wanna ask you something.” His voice seemed to be growing deeper and louder.
“Yeah?” she squeaked. She was practically batting her eyelashes at him. Ol’ Shawna sure was stoked now, thought Frank.
“Those potatoes, do you know if they are genetically engineered?” Y asked. His voice was really loud, now, booming over the ambient Christmas music being pumped in through the PA system—so loud that the customers in line at the checkout stations looked up to see what was going on.
“Huh?” Shawna didn’t know what he was talking about, and his volume was making her nervous.
“These potatoes!” Y held up the bag. “Have they been genetically engineered?”
Shawna looked around. She didn’t want to get in trouble. It occurred to her that maybe this guy was a creep. Then, two lanes down, she caught sight of Frank, grinning like a madman. She narrowed her eyes.
“Listen,” she said smartly, “like, do you want me to ring this up or not?”
“I don’t know. Could you call your manager and maybe I could ask him?”
“Are you, like, serious?”
“Yeah, I really want to know.” Y turned toward the fit young mother behind him. “Maybe you could tell me,” he said, looking apologetic but still very concerned. “Do you happen to know if these are genetically engineered?”
The woman shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. I don’t know—”
Y nodded. “That’s the problem, isn’t it?” He held out his finger to the infant in the shopping cart, making her dribble and coo. “We don’t know because they don’t tell us! They’re genetically engineering poisons into potatoes these days. But they refuse to label it, so how are you supposed to know what you’re feeding your baby?”
Meanwhile Shawna was hollering over to the next cashier.
“Hey, Doreen, you hear anything about someone engineering the potatoes?”
The woman next in line tapped the young mother on the shoulder. “Did he say something about bug poison?”
“Poison?” cried Lilith over in Lane 1.
“Poisoned potatoes?” echoed Charmey in Lane 7.
And just then a deep, amplified voice boomed out over the PA system.
“Attention shoppers! Did somebody say POTATOES?”
The loud reggae version of “Here Comes Santa Claus” drowned out the Christmas carols and silenced the crowd. They turned and stared at the apparition dancing toward them.
It was Mr. Potato Head, twirling a candy-striped cane as he pushed a shopping cart bearing an enormous boom box toward the cash registers. Now, Mr. Potato Head was not just any old spud. He was a sweet, sporty potato, friendly and dapper. He had big, googly eyes and lozenge-shaped ears, as pink as Pepto-Bismol. He wore a green leisure suit and a Santa Claus hat perched on the top of his bald, orbicular head. He hung his cane over one arm and did a spudly little soft-shoe on his spindly green legs.
He positioned his cart in a central location in front of Lane 5, then danced along the aisles, distributing paper daisies and leaflets. By now the children, tired of waiting with their moms, were laughing and clapping. They ran to him and tugged on his burlap hide. They jumped up and down.
The Seeds quickly followed suit, passing leaflets to the customers in their lanes. Then they pushed their shopping carts forward, circling Mr. Potato Head’s boom box like a wagon train shoring up defenses. Frank started joining the carts together with inconspicuous lengths of precut baling wire. The barricade would not be much of a deterrent to the police, Geek had explained, but it would make their arrest more spectacular. When the cops showed up, the Seeds would close ranks and cordon themselves off in the center. In order to reach them, the cops would have to tear the shopping carts apart or tip them over—a noisy business. Crude and violent. Very impressive.
Charmey, meanwhile, had opened a bag of Idaho bakers and tossed a couple of spuds to Y, who juggled them and threw them to Lilith, who added a squash, and before long, dozens of potatoes, zucchinis, squashes, and even tomatoes were tumbling through the air in precise, intricate arcs. Mr. Potato Head returned to the center of the circle and continued his soft-shoe amid the
