I was in the grocery store right before Christmas and the lady in front of me was talking to me about getting in the wrong line because the people in front of her had all kinds of issues. I didn’t know what they were, but we were smiling and laughing about that sort of thing. One day, I was in line behind some folks that had to run out to their car and get a jar of coins to help pay for their groceries.  So yes, it can be trying.

But I wasn’t bothered by it. I was getting the last of my Christmas food for the kids’ arrival and was of good cheer. The old woman behind me was scowling and I smiled at her, trying to put her in a better mood. She asked, “What time is it?”

I told her. She asked two more times.

Then the folks ahead of us were done, but not, forgot to pay for one more item, and the lady in front of me and I were just smiling. Hey, it happens, and I was fortunate to have someone to talk to that was really nice and it made her feel better for the delay.

Once I had my items on the conveyer belt, I put the little divider down and turned to the woman behind me and asked if she wanted me to help her unload her groceries.

“No!” she snapped at me. “Just move out of my way.”

“I’m sorry, but the lady in front of me is still paying for her groceries.” And I turned my back on the woman behind me and figured that was the last I’d try to be nice to her. Some people are just not very nice. They’re sour and dour and maybe they always lived their lives that way. Some think as they get older, they can behave even worse.

Who knows?

But she proceeded to get aggressive, running into my backside with her backside to load groceries onto the belt. Now, she could have gone to the end of the belt and loaded a good number of groceries on it without touching me.  But I didn’t move, because my basket was in front of me, and I didn’t want to crowd the woman who was using her credit card in front of me. I wished her a Merry Christmas and then I was cheerily talking to the clerk. She saw my puppy stuff and asked me about that as she ran my things through and the woman behind me just scowled at us.

I was bothered by the old woman being so nasty. I kept telling myself to ignore her nastiness, but I couldn’t.

One time, I was in the parking lot and an older man looked so grim, I smiled and said, “Hi.” It made his day and he began talking away to me. Another day, I asked an older man if I could take his basket for him, and he watched me, shocked that I was taking it to the return and not using it to go into the grocery store. I had just returned my own. But he looked to be struggling to get his groceries into the car a bit, and I thought I could help him at least with the basket return. He told me he thought I was going to use the basket and was so cheered that I did a “good deed” for him. Another day, a woman did that to me, my first time, lol, and she asked if she could return my basket too.

It really made me feel great. Doing a little bit for some people can really make their day, though I’m in Texas and so it can be so here. Or Oklahoma, same way. I had car trouble at a mall in NJ once and three lovely men from England helped jumpstart my car while no one from NJ would give me the time of day. I was twenty-one at the time, so not a threat at all. Not that all are like that, but some places more people are willing to help out.

And this brings me to my stories. The Phantom Fae queen had killed her husband over some marital dispute. But at 5 this morning when the puppies got me up to take them out, I began to think about it. What was her story? Her real story? People are the way they are for some reason. Maybe they’ve always been bad-natured and been allowed to be that way. Pampered, so to speak. Or maybe they had a bad life growing up, they just had something horrible happen to them, financially, losing a family member, a friend, a pet, or are ill. We never know.

But in our stories, we have to know. 🙂 So, I had to come up with a reason. Maybe not a full reason, but something that will reveal some hints about the person.

Why was the woman so nasty in the grocery store even after I reached out to be nice to her? Who knows. I’ve known people like that, one who was an older friend of my mother’s and lied about her husband dying. For years, we thought that was the case. Then her cousin told my mother that the woman’s husband had left her for another woman. I think that had left her embittered. She could never deal with it, so just wrote him off as dead. For her age, because even though divorce has been going on for eons, it just hasn’t been as acceptable in some time periods, she found it much easier to be a “widow,” than a divorcee. But she was really spoiled, her ex-husband having left her well off, and her family too. So I would go with my mother and her friends to card games and she was always so nasty. “Quit talking! Play the game.” The point of the game was to socialize, at least the rest of us thought. We had fun and joked about her behavior later.

My mother would often say, “Oh, it’s not your turn?” One lady always played out of turn because she couldn’t remember. They were fun games and well, someday I should probably use them in a story, come to think of it.

A little after the grocery store incident, a fan sent a video of a woman at a grocery store where another woman allowed her kid to run the basket into the other woman. So the victim poured a drink all over the kid’s head. The kid screams and cries. The mother is furious and storms off with her kid, and I’m thinking, okay, so what if this woman behind me was that kid. Only the victim hadn’t reacted, like I hadn’t. Just ignored it. And the kid continued to act badly over the years, and anytime she wanted her way, she got it, through any means available.

If I had dumped one of the Dr. Pepper’s on the woman’s head that I was buying for my SIL for Christmas, maybe she wouldn’t have done something like that again. Of course, I would have been arrested.

So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Have you ever had to deal with grocery store bullies???

And Savage Hunger is still free!!! Off to give my phantom fae queen a reason for being so evil. 🙂