Shipt
Admiral Biscuit
I see ponies everywhere.
•••
This wasn’t always the case.
There didn’t used to be ponies, and then something happened and there were.
I don’t really understand what it was, not exactly, and I don’t know if anybody else does, either. Sure, there were explanations; there were talking heads on the television pontificating about the multiverse and wormholes and probabilities and uncertainty theorems and Lord knows what else. At first I just tuned them out because that wasn’t the news I was interested in. There were pictures, then there were interviews and then I saw my first pony in real life and that’s when it finally hit home that they existed.
They weren’t just something on the television.
They were really here.
•••
I was in Lansing, going about a day as normal. I’d finished my shift at Firestone and got in my truck and drove over to the mall because my brother’s birthday was coming up and I needed to get him something. I only ever shop at the mall for special occasions.
Ponies are a lot smaller than people. I hadn’t known that; whenever they were interviewed on the news, it was just the pony and it was hard to get a sense of scale from just watching something on the TV. I had an idea that they were like horses but not quite as big.
She—I assume it was a she, because her coat was pink—was a unicorn. She came out of Hot Topic as I was going by and I just caught a glimpse of a plastic shopping bag with a bit of a glow around it, a light blue glow, it was. Just around the handles. That was what caught my attention first, the shopping bag floating along purposefully, not like a bag caught in a gust of wind.
If her color had been less vibrant, I might not have noticed her, but she stood out from the muted color of bluejeans, a little spot of light moving through the mall.
And then she was gone. It turns out ponies aren’t that big, and can get lost in crowds easily, even if they’re a vibrant pink.
I went to Barnes and Noble and I found a couple of books I thought my brother might be interested in, but I wasn’t all that focused on my selection at all; I was still thinking about that brief glimpse of an Equine—as some people called them—just shopping, just going about her daily business.
They say when you’ve noticed something, you start to see it everywhere. My first pickup truck didn’t have a sliding rear window, and I thought that was really rare, but after I bought it, I really started to notice the rear windows on pickups, and it turned out there were quite a lot with solid rear windows.
Thus it was with ponies.
•••
I noticed it on the news. Every now and then, there was a spokespony explaining something.
I noticed it at restaurants. There were now pony options when it came to food.
I sometimes saw them in commercials. The kind where a company wants to show how inclusive it is, and besides the usual token minorities, they also showed a pony.
It was a strange time. Nothing was sacred.
Every now and then, things would flare up in the relentless news cycle as society tried to adapt. Could ponies join the military? Who would they be loyal to? Should doorknobs be pony-friendly? How could a pony be fingerprinted? Could a pony operate an automobile? Opinions varied.
I went on living my life. I went to work and shopped when I needed to, and I didn’t see any major cultural shifts happening but at the same time, I knew that they were.
There was a front-page piece in the Lansing State Journal when the first non-student pony moved into her apartment, and then a smaller article when the second one did, and then after that there were surely more but things mostly died down until a pony bought a horse farm and that was newsworthy; that was worth a week in the local news, that was worth dozens of photographs of her caring for animals which were like her but not like her.
I suppose when the Western world had discovered great apes, there might have been similar news coverage.
•••
She was a fairly mundane pony, as ponies went. She—I assumed; she looked female—was brown, a fur color that would have looked at home on an actual horse. Likewise, her mane was plain in color, almost white or perhaps a very light blonde.
She was shopping in Meijer.
And she was wearing a shirt.
There had been countless debates about whether ponies should wear clothes or not. While I wasn’t somebody who mattered enough to ever be interviewed on the subject, I would have said that it would look weird for a pony to be wearing clothes. Even though it’s not the same thing, every time I saw somebody’s dumb dog wearing clothes, I felt bad for the dog. It had no agency, no way to protest being dressed up and being paraded around as a fashion accessory.
There was an endless supply of foaming-at-the-mouth individuals who were more than willing to reveal their craziness on television and argue endlessly how the mere sight of a pony au natural was the sole reason for the collapse of Western society. How it would corrupt children, how it would cause the collapse of civilization as we knew it. It was no different than arguing that playing Magic summoned demons or how playing video games was a gateway pastime to committing mass murder.
She was wearing a shirt, a green shirt, and appropriately enough it had silk screened image of a UFO on it.
Another cultural shift that had happened slowly and subtly, there was an app that let you have food delivered from a local grocery store.
I’d never considered the app myself, even though I hated shopping with the burning passion of a thousand suns. I relied on knowing the layout of Meijer, of being able to get in and out in under a half hour with food for the week. The goal was always to spend as little time as possible in store, to get the same things week after week. The things I knew I’d like, the things I knew I’d eat.
She was wearing a shirt with a Shipt logo on it, and she was consulting a cell phone strapped to her foreleg.
•••
There were pony-friendly shopping carts. They’d just showed up at all the big chain stores and after a while, it had been like they’d been there all along.
When I was a kid, there weren’t options. There was one size of cart, and that was that.
Before ponies, things had already progressed to big shopping carts and little ones; baskets and mobility scooters; there were carts that looked like cars for kids to ride in and child-scaled ones at Polly’s with a flag that said “customer in training” for older kids to push. That last one was kind of creepy when I thought about it too much.
She was pushing a pony-friendly shopping cart and consulting the cell phone strapped to her foreleg, and after a moment of processing the weirdness of it, I couldn’t help but wonder if the app sorted things by department. Did it use the phone’s GPS and know what Meijer she was in? I had the floor layout of the three I most commonly went to memorized, at least for the stuff I bought all the time.
It wasn’t polite to stare but there were a lot of people at Meijer and she was concentrating on jars of pickles, no doubt choosing the correct one. She finally made her selection and spun the jar around, squinting to read the numbers on the bar code just to make sure.
For a second, as she pulled it off the shelf, I thought she’d drop it and break it.
Once it was safely in her cart, she lifted her leg up—the one with the cell phone—and tapped it with her nose, then moved down the aisle, her eyes focused on the various canned and jarred foods.
Back in the day, a good taxi driver had to memorize all the streets, had to have a mental map of the city. According to a YouTube video I’d once watched, that was still a requirement for getting a taxi licence in London, even though GPS had probably rendered the need for that particular skill moot.
Assuming that the Shipt app isn’t to the point where it tells the delivery person—delivery pony where all the items are in one particular store, an efficient and profitable shopper would know where everything should be. Would know, even if the app doesn’t, what the most efficient way to get all the items on the list is.
She’s not quite there yet, but she’s close. I could tell the difference between purpose and confusion; she homes in on a section of shelving and pretty soon a dozen cans of Starkist tuna are in her basket.
They were on sale: buy ten, get one free. Were the savings passed on to the customer, or was that a bit more profit on her end?
•••
I usually tried to get in and out of Meijer in under a half hour, but this time I didn’t.
I wasn’t stalking her; that would be creepy. Instead, she was working a similar path to mine, front to back, skipping the aisles that carried nothing on her list. Sometimes we were facing as we went down an aisle and I wondered if it was socially acceptable to wave to my newfound acquaintance; other times, she was at the opposite end of the aisle and I only saw her backside.
She and I both had to squeeze by a Karen on her cell phone, cart blocking most of the aisle as she debated with her husband or boyfriend or whomever is on the other end of the line. Judging by Karen’s agitated pacing, the choice between Ragu and Prego might’ve been life or death.
•••
For a brief moment, we shared a conversation. Maxwell House was on sale, and the coffee section looked like it had been gone over by a horde of Mongols. Somewhere in there was surely a can of Master Blend, and as I looked, I heard a feminine voice with a subtle and exotic accent quietly say “excuse me.”
“Sorry.” I stepped back and a hoof reached in, selecting a boring can of medium roast, and then it was gone.
Like most guys, I don’t often notice the little details, but I had noticed the smoothly-brushed fur on her leg, the shine of her hoof, and the glint of her steel shoe.
•••
I hadn’t intended it, but we wound up being lane buddies.
I finished before she did—I’d headed for the checkouts after finally laying claim to my Master Blend, while she’d had to take a detour to the pet section to pick up a bucket of kitty litter.
The man in front of me was either stocking up for the apocalypse or else he was a once-a-month shopper. When it came time for the lanes, I didn’t patrol the front of the store like some; I just chose my lane and stuck with it. Once upon a time, I’d skimmed through Archie comic digests or whatever other magazine they were offering as an impulse purchase; these days, I just got out my cell phone and caught up on friend drama and memes on Facebook.
Once there was enough room on the belt for things, I started unloading my cart, and as soon as I’d finished, I set the bar at the end of my groceries as a courtesy.
No sooner than I had done that, a familiar foreleg started loading the belt.
There were so many questions I wanted to ask her, both broad and specific, but I wasn’t sure that was socially acceptable. Just the same, I closed Facebook and scrunched my groceries together a bit, giving her more room.
I hadn’t noticed before, but her shod hooves made a distinctive clack on the tiles every time she shifted on her hooves. Not quite as pronounced as tap shoes, but noticeable.
•••
It wasn’t polite to stare, so I didn’t, but I couldn’t help but notice as the clerk slid the dividing bars down, she hoofed one her way and then chose a single packet of Eclipse bubblegum. That was a personal purchase. Did ponies in general like bubblegum, or was that just her? I didn’t know; for all the coverage that had been on the news, they’d never covered chewing gum.
How would she even unwrap it? There was the cellophane and then after that the gum was in little foil-covered plastic recesses, which didn’t seem all that hoof-friendly. Still, if she could put a jar of Gielow pickles in her cart without dropping them, surely chewing gum wasn’t beyond her abilities.
•••
Conventional wisdom is to not shop when you’re hungry, and I normally didn’t.
Meijer had you covered if you were. Besides all the snack food in the isles and the candies and individual sodas at checkout, this one also had a Subway near the entrance. They were currently advertising bacon for an extra $.50 on any footlong.
I’d never been much of a fan of Subway—in my opinion, it was a food option when there was literally nothing else, and that was about it.
Just the same, I dallied there, not buying anything, until I saw her walk past. Her shopping cart was empty and her saddlebags were bulging.
I couldn’t decide if I should feel bad for her that she had to carry the groceries that way, or if I should be jealous that she could.
•••
I suppose the usual way that Shipt worked was that the buyer would load all the groceries in their car and drive to the address in question.
I didn’t see her leave Meijer, because I stopped at the gas station. Just as I needed food once a week, so did my car, and it was convenient to do all my shopping in one place.
When I got back on the road, I did spot her, walking purposefully down the cracked and broken sidewalk. Michigan isn’t known for the quality of its roads, and the sidewalks are generally worse, if they exist at all.
For just a moment, I considered slowing down, maybe pulling into the parking lot in front of her. Roll down the window, offer her a ride.
But I didn’t.
I could still see her in the rearview mirror as I sat at the traffic light by the former Blockbuster that was now a Sherwin Williams paint store.
The world was changing, and I was okay with it.