The last customer

The supermarket stopped accepting money on a Tuesday, decades ago.

Not cards, not cash. Not the little government stipend that arrived each month in an account nobody could close. The doors opened, the lights warmed to a domestic yellow and a woman’s voice said: “Welcome home, Mr. Smith. Your nutritional requirements have been anticipated.”

Adam stood in the entrance with a dead pigeon in his coat pocket. He had found it outside, neck broken flying against the glass, one wing still twitching as though it were trying to sign something. He did not know why he picked it up. Habit, probably. When the world begins handing you everything, you start collecting small proofs that it can still kill things.

Inside, the shelves were full. That was the joke: tomatoes like polished organs, bread with a crust so perfect it looked printed, meat under lights the color of a confessional. A machine at the end of aisle four printed insulin from a cartridge the size of a lipstick. He walked past all of it.

He was 59, though the mirror had begun disagreeing. His hands smelled of glue from the last job he still did by hand: repairing old radios for a man who paid him in batteries. Nobody needed radios, though. That was the point. A thing nobody needed was the last honest thing left.

There was no cashier at the checkout. “Your basket has been optimized” — said the ceiling.

“I didn’t take anything, fool!” — Adam replied in frustration.