The grocery store where Meera worked had begun to deplete her, to melt her days together. Every day she walked in and felt almost nauseous at the sight of the unique and ugly place, the old warehouse alienating in its vastness and its broad darkness, its humidity, its black and dusty floors. She was only ever satisfied while leaning over the black matte rectangle of the checkout scale, twirling the thick wire of the scanner around her finger and watching people leave with their plastic bags full of food, thinking about what marvelous meals they might be cooking. While scanning she was forced to distill foods into their numbers, something she hated, finding it deadening and unnatural: 4048 for limes, 4435 for spinach, 4436 for kale, the 4600s for peppers, the 4800s for nuts, the 4900s for all the apple cultivars. She was always mixing them up, always finding herself shouting at Amy down the checkout lines, who knew them all. Management would not upgrade the registers. In all it was enough the drain the pleasure from a person. The question now became how to reorient her life at the register: how to reorient her very being.

    She decided she would persevere by focusing on the very essence of the food in the carts. She would try hard to imagine what meals the people might be making, no longer idly but with the full force of a vision: what was held in pantries, freezers, pots and pans. She saw exhausted and serious mothers pushing carts overflowing with onions, canned beans, and ten-pound bags of rice; students cheerily filling their baskets up with instant meals, cilantro, vegetable mixes and lemons; professionals nervously aggregating delicate quantities of olives, saffron, white truffle and lamb chops. Even a cart of meat to her was beautiful: a man dreaming of a barbecue. She tried to stop looking at their faces, noticing only the bodies of the people next to their food, hungry people, well-fed people, the floral skirt hanging straight and unrustled next to the spinach wet with condensation. Shivering in its iron cages, the food was mute and whole.

    She began to intervene. There was a man with extra firm tofu and sesame oil. 

    “How do you cook that tofu?” she asked him. “Fry it up?”

    The words sounded weird on her tongue. She was a quiet person with a nervous voice, not one to speak up.

    “Mm-hmm.”

    She scanned a few more items. 

    “You should really try rubbing it with nutritional yeast and red pepper flakes sometime,” she said, a little too quickly, and feeling the eyes of her manager she winced. “I can take you to the spices if you like.”

    “Oh, I’ll try that,” said the man, a little uncomfortable.

    “Shall we?” she said.

    “I have some at home, in fact.”

    She spent the rest of her shift dreaming idly about his squares of tofu peppered with red and gold flakes, like tiny squares of minerals, a beautiful thing she had made happen without even being there to see it. She was beginning to feel the first flourishings of reclamation. When customers accepted her recommendations she would guide them proudly through the aisles, looking around at all the lovely food and feeling the wetness of the misting system. To be safe she stopped offering if she felt that Kathy’s eyes were on her. Kathy was her manager.

    One day a woman appeared with thick arms in a long and pretty green dress, leaf green with ruffles at the bottom against the rows of candy behind her like rainbow bricks. Very bright, very gaudy. In her cart were bell peppers, yellow onions, buttermilk, skim milk, a jar of raita, a can of tomatoes, sourdough, sliced turkey, fish sauce, mirin, eggs, and a bottle of honey shaped like a bear.

    “Making anything?” Meera asked, squinting at the food on the conveyor belt. 

    “Just the basics.” Her voice was deep, like a movie star’s. 

    Meera waited a moment before continuing, hearing the shuffle of the plastic bags as she moved them off of the metal rack. 

    “What are the basics?” she asked. She was trying to sound casual. As if finally understanding, the woman in the green dress listed the meals she usually ate, oh omelets, sandwiches, that sort of thing, and Meera with patience listened until seizing upon one like a cat: curries in the evening, with onions chickpeas and canned tomatoes. And after another moment, timing it very precisely now, and with a little smile, Meera told her that it would be lovely, just lovely, not only for reasons of taste but also for reasons of beauty, which is just as important, if she finished her curries with a few delicately sautéed yucca blossoms. The woman had never heard of them. Together they left the register and went to the flowers dried in brown cardboard boxes next to the lime leaves and the mushrooms, Meera talking about them all the way, about their flavor, and making things up about their nutrition, passing now the daikon roots and the napa cabbage and the winter melons, and the woman in the green dress nodding with delicate enthusiasm, and all the while Meera thinking of the lovely white and yellow hue, the kitchen steam looking like dew on the petal.

    The woman in the green dress shopped every Sunday or sometimes Saturdays and each time she bought a bouquet of yucca flowers. This is my mark, thought Meera, a little sarcastically, but secretly with pleasure. She liked their chats, besides. To her their conversations were always tinged with a light irony, like the two of them knew that what they were talking about was a little bit ridiculous, like they both knew that the other person was just a little bit smarter than that: they talked about recipes, family life, television, the weather, the deliciousness of the yucca flowers, gossip. Meera had the vague impression that they were really getting at something. Getting at something beyond the yucca. Once or twice the woman forgot her yucca flower and they strolled together to the yucca aisle a little quietly. Even when the yucca woman wasn’t there, on Mondays Tuesdays Wednesdays Thursdays Fridays and usually Saturdays, Meera was venturing further into her daydreams, allowing the food to take on the qualities of the voices of the customers: breezy voices for dinner parties that evening, huge ladles of fish stew and warm bread as well, for the old friends from college, cocktail kits laid out delicately and purposefully on metal trays. Indifferent voices for a quick meal thrown together before or after work. Sad voices for lonely meals. But she always left her shift thinking about how every night a mile and a half down the road the yucca woman lived with her jarred raita and her curry powder and her yucca flowers, and the same grains of rice were expanding in the water, becoming soft and fluffy and luminescent (unless, of course, the yucca woman, who had mentioned once that she lived across from a Quaker fellowship, lived across from the other one, but that was unlikely, because it was across town, and then why would she come all the way across town to shop at such a sad and dusty grocery store, unless it was to see Meera).

    Then when the woman next came up to the register without the yucca flowers, leaning in that familiar way over the red paint of the shopping cart, and Meera said, “You’ve forgotten your yucca flowers today,” feeling excited at the prospect of stretching her legs a little bit, of looking at all the yellow onions in the first row of the produce section with their papery brown skin, of taking her to the yucca flowers, of seeing them tremble, the woman said: “I don’t want any yucca flowers today.” 

    Knowing now what it would take she began to hide the yucca flowers under the counter so that she could slip them into the plastic bags whenever she saw the yucca woman.Meera clutched the tiny and delicate things in her palms beneath the darkness of the register until she could see that the yucca woman was twisting her body to retrieve her wallet from her purse. She slipped them in. She was triumphing. She was the Robin Hood of yucca flowers. Probably the yucca woman would see the flowers and think nothing of it or think that she had automatically and unconsciously bought them (as one sometimes does) and put them into her curry and be fulfilled. And Meera would have made her mark on the world. And the yucca woman would come back and buy more yucca flowers. Or else Meera would continue to deposit them. After slipping them in she imagined herself isometrically, from the video camera, looking suspicious and proud as she handed the woman the receipt. So could Kathy, later. 

    The second time she tried to slip them in, the woman caught her. 

    “Did you put this into my bag?” she asked. 

    “I thought you had forgotten it,” said Meera. 

    “I didn’t,” said the woman. She placed the flower on the counter. 

    “You should take the flower,” said Meera.

    “I don’t want it today,” said the woman.

    “Take it,” Meera repeated, a little desperate.

    “No,” said the woman. “Not today.”

    She tried begging the woman to take it. Then she tried demanding that the woman take it, because why not, after all, and just throw it away if you don’t like it. Finally she just stuffed it into the bag. The woman fished the flower out of the bag and again she placed it firmly on the counter.

    Kathy had had enough. When she came up to Meera’s register with that intimidating and quick way of walking, Meera looked up and saw her. Her face was delicate and disturbed.

    “I think you should take a break from the register,” she said with feigned sympathy.

    The yucca woman was looking at Meera with her dark eyes. Meera was moved to inventory: to unloading trucks, her body forced into the deeper darkness of the warehouse. After the initial fear, it seemed for a moment that she might be happier. Her workday was silent now, or nearly silent, no more shouting down the aisles, only outside at the loading docks where there was room to shout, and she holding the cans of fire-roasted diced tomatoes in her hands, imagining the redness inside, and this satisfying her for a few weeks until she found with some frustration that it wasn’t the beauty, it hadn’t been the beauty at all, feeling sick and thwarted in her attempt to make a little space for herself while Kathy paused a moment to watch her before closing the metal door.