to reverse it, buy their way out, and this was all any ruling body seemed to do these days, live under sufferance with the choices of the previous administration, or at least make it sound that way. Dorothy sat in the back half of the bus, so when it turned she would feel a momentum swing, a surge of uncontrol. The window by her head was streaked with a whitish substance, as if an egg had been thrown at it and the glair dried in the sun. Out of the narrow streets, outside suburban stand-alone houses, trees flared with spring blossoms and magnolia, rhododendrons, daphne. Through the sliver of open window the scent of the daphne passed faintly, like something imagined. A tree stood bare-branched, surrounded by its fallen scarlet petals as though it had given an enormous sigh and shed everything. Dot scrolled the pages of her book, another book she couldn’t read without her glasses and magnifying glass; all very well enlarging the font but not when it ended up three words per line. How did women go about the world on their own without books? You saw it, but she would never understand.
The grocery store was identical to the one on her corner, down to the point-of-sale promotions and the black-wheel streaks on the linoleum by the refrigerators. Dorothy had not eaten breakfast in the hope of generating some kind of hunger, but now the grabby feeling in her stomach wouldn’t focus itself on anything. It was just before noon. The women shopping looked identical to the women in her neighbourhood. Their shoes were thrashed but clean. So sad. The phrase came into Dot’s mind while she sniffed leathery oranges from the fruit bins, a two-note descending sing-song like the poor fucker caged bird in the downstairs apartment. So sad. So sad. Who had said that lately? Of what? Perhaps the women behind her on the bus. Women, it had to be noted, were everywhere. There in the reflection of the fridge doors was a woman not unlike Dot, same height, same age, who looked as if she didn’t care about food any more either, though she was wearing a thick blue sweatshirt and tracksuit pants, so where her body began was obscured. Yes, definitely a double reflection, not a trick of the light, nor Dot’s usual surprise that the old woman caught ghostily in a shop window as she passed it was, in fact, herself.
Their reflections smiled at each other and the mirror woman’s face became a walnut, deep creases from her mouth running all the way up to her temples. Dot leaned forward and pulled the heavy door open, its suction straps unpeeling like black liquorice, and the other woman’s reflection swung closer as the door moved. The refrigerator puffed hot air around Dot’s ankles and her fingers grew cold. She turned cheeses over looking for the ones that had further until their expiry date, the ones they always kept in the back. Cheese was a guaranteed pleasure. One of these days she would wake up and discover herself to be a giant mouse.
In one corner of the grocery store the fluorescent overhead lights were out. Dot had the feeling this had happened in the exact same corner in her local store – or perhaps it was the synaptic shudder of déjà vu. Diego made her take aspirin every day now, and that shit must be doing something. Here everything looked soft, grey, old. The edges of the cardboard cake-mix boxes were matt and worn, as though overly handled. A cloying smell rose from a tray of thin green aubergines that lay limply on pulpy-looking ridged blue cardboard. The baking soda she was looking for was not there. Her local store was also out. Why must this be? If they had to deal with the pigeons she had to deal with, they would ensure constant supplies of baking soda. In her neighbourhood people bought it because it was cheaper than toothpaste; here perhaps it was being used to bake cakes. Dot circumnavigated the store again, to check that there wasn’t a shelving anomaly, and she should have registered as odd that the other woman was keeping pace with her at a distance of a couple of yards, but these places were full of weirdos. By the mysterious locked door in the back wall of the shop, a door to the staff toilet or stack room or an asphalt, oily car park, a teenage boy with