The Queer as Folk Grocery Store Challenge

Other People's Lives
by Starla / Soundczech

Brian is pretty sure that when he ends up in the hell to which his mother has been damning him most of his life, itíll look a lot like this. Fluorescent lighting. Crudely packaged canned goods. Other peopleís children running around covered in Nutella and Dorito crumbs, putting their sticky little fucking fingers all over his favourite fucking leather jacket.

"Remind me why the fuck I have to be here?"

Justin doesn't look up from his sketch, so Brian nudges him with one square-toed Prada boot.

"You don't," Justin reminds him. "You're the one that latched on to me like some kind of mutant barnacle."

Brian closes his mouth and leans back against the Spam display. He jiggles his leg and looks at his watch. Scans the store one last fucking time, because even if there aren't any other queers in this hole, there's just got to be a breeder burning with unfulfilled curiosity.

He contemplates the stock boy with the flat ass and spotty neck one more time and then nudges Justin again, harder this time. "Why do you have to be here?"

"I told you. I'm working on a project."

"You're not in school. Can't you just be normal for once?" A third nudge, and this time Justin looks up, that pretty little mouth twisted and tilted with a sneer.

"If normal is fucking myself down to the lowest common denominator - like you - then thanks, but no thanks. There's thing called dignity. I think you left yours in the soda aisle."

Fucking brat. Sitting there cross legged on a beige linoleum floor, pencils scattered in twos and threes around his feet, and he has the nerve, the fucking nerve, to lecture Brian about dignity.

Brian opens his mouth to argue, but Justin holds up a hand and stops him. "Two minutes ago, you were going to fuck that guy out of boredom," he says, nodding towards a brunette with overgrown eyebrows and a devastating plumber's crack. "You need a job."

The guy's ass isn't that bad. "No, I don't."

"You're such a pussy."

"Fuck you!"

Justin looks around. Gestures with one sharp red pencil, the same shade as the inner curve of his lips. "Look around. What do you see?"

Brian looks. He sees old women with demented shopping trolleys, tired housewives in sweatshirts striped and slashed with dried chocolate sauce. An old man gazing at two melons as if they held the secrets to the universe.

"Freaks?"

"They're just normal people, Brian. They've got to get food for their kids or their dogs. They're living their lives. Which is more than I can say for you."

"I have a life."

"No, you don't." That red pen touches paper and Brian watches as Justin etches out a tomato between the fingers of a little girl. "At the moment, you've just got mine. And that's why you're sitting here bored out of your mind and thinking about fucking Joe Mediocre."

Brian is silent. He watches the little girl's tomato take shape on Justin's page.

He hates it when Justin is right.

THE END