What My Mother Said to the Gunman in the Vegetable Aisle at Pak’N’Save

Since my mother no longer rode her bike over the big railway bridge, her scarf coming loose in the billowing smoke, and since she no longer got to Funky Pumpkin running her hands over the big bins of kumara, since she was in fact at Pak’N’Save on a Tuesday afternoon at 2pm eyeing up the cauliflower heads while a gunman in a black balaclava told everyone to get down on the floor, since her hips were sore and the floor a long way down and since the gunman looked familiar, since his red rimmed eyes looked frantic, since his hand was shaking and the gun was waving like something in a movie, she faced him, “Son.  …” she began and since an off duty cop who’d been previously fondling an orange in the next aisle was already cocking his trigger, things happened pretty quickly, shots ringing out and the gunman falling and a pink haired girl rising from the floor to pull my mother aside and since the gunman is now in a wheelchair, and since my mother no longer remembers that terrible day, no one will ever really know what she was about to say to the gunman in the vegetable aisle at Pak’N’Save. 

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Frankie McMillan is a poet and short fiction writer. Her latest book, The Wandering Nature of Us Girls, (Canterbury University Press) was published in 2022.