The Store Will Be Closing Shortly Author Note - 07/06/25
"The Store Will Be Closing Shortly" was published a few months ago in Tiny Molecules. It's kinda a perfect full circle moment: it got published just as I graduated from college, and the first draft of it was written for my first creative writing class two years ago. The final assignment for the class had two parts. First, we were supposed to go on a website like Craigslist/Nextdoor/etc and find posts that interested us and sparked ideas for stories. I chose a Nextdoor post about a Safeway in my home city of San Francisco closing. The poster was really upset by its imminent closure, and this surprised me. It wasn't a cute local place, it was a Safeway, one of billions of depersonalized supermarkets. There was even another Safeway less than a five minute drive away, and a Trader Joe's right across the street. I was so interested in this poster - who would mourn a Safeway like this? I didn't want to write a story to mock her, I wanted to understand her, what could make someone form an attachment to a supermarket like that. I started brainstorming stories about someone unable to let go of a supermarket - maybe in an apocalypse?
That was just the first step of the assignment. Before I started writing, I got an email from my professor telling me that I should incorporate a photo he'd chosen into my story, in whatever form I came up with. Here was my photo:
This is where the cat came from, and the cloud that looks like the cat. A small cat juxtaposed with a giant representation of itself. The individual versus the large scale, which is really what this story is about. The cat gave me a basic plot for the story - Lucia finds a cat - and that carried me through this whole piece. A year later, my best friend and writing partner, the incomparable Haven Tang-Davis, read the story (which was, at the time, in present tense) and noted how fixated it was on the future and continued survival. With that in mind, I moved the timeframe of the story up - the section with Allison going from past to present, the cat plot in the future. It creates this air of inevitability and futility - there's this idea that Lucia is clinging onto something she can't really hold onto anymore.
So why an apocalypse? Why a botanical one? Why DOES Lucia cling to the supermarket? Why did my Nextdoor user? To talk about that, we have to talk about Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The semester before this creative writing class, I'd taken a complit course on plants. My final essay for the class was on Invasion of the Body Snatchers - the 1978 one - a movie about plants replacing people. If you haven't seen it - plant-based aliens land in San Francisco and start cloning people in pods and replacing them. It's a really fascinating movie, especially because it is literally about communism. The pod people are basically a hivemind, but they also act with strict hierarchy. A pod person stands on a soapbox and yells orders through a megaphone as lines of emotionless pod people load boxes into cars and prepare to take over the world. It's literally just American fears of communism - they're gonna take away our personality, our individuality, our small businesses! Those dirty communists are going to replace the people you love with people who are exactly like them, but they're WRONG, they do labor INCORRECTLY, their hierarchies are STRANGE AND EVIL, they're a hivemind but they're also a dictatorship. It all makes more sense once you remember that it's an adaptation of a movie from 1956. McCarthyism, baby! It even applies to gay people in the same way. When the main character is like "oh no, my boyfriend's acting weird, he's not like himself!" the other main character is like "maybe he's gay!". The pod people are blamed for the family unit being "shot to hell". Here's the conceit: the plant people (the communists) are going to come, and they're going to dismantle your life, your white picket fence, they'll take away your possessions. The ultimate threat of the pod people is that you will not be you anymore, your life will not be yours anymore - do you see the parallels to fears of communism forcing you to labor (haha ignore how capitalism alienates workers from their labor) and turning your kids gay?
My essay argued that the pod people are plants because plants and fungi (which aren't plants, but fungi were included in botany for a long time, so. work with me here) challenge American and capitalist notions of individuality and interconnectivity. The original name for this story was Mycorrhizal, from mycorrhizal networks of fungi. Fungi work in fundamentally non-individual ways, full of interconnections, both between other mushrooms and with other creatures in their ecosystem, often depending on them for survival. It's the reason it's hard to grow matsutake in labs - the mushrooms require pine trees to grow. The pine trees, in turn, benefit from the mushrooms, and many other organisms do as well. In her book The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing refers to this as precarity: "the condition of being vulnerable to others" (page 20).
We are also precarious, vulnerable to others, but so much of our society depends on us pretending we aren't. It's the whole white picket fence. The nuclear family exists to cut oneself off from the rest of the world, stake an individualist claim on the world. Community - communal living (and communism!) - is seen as a threat. Under capitalism, under the American Dream, the individual comes before the community. That's why the pod people get to both be a hivemind and a dictatorship - both types of living threaten an individualist world.
And so when I thought about what might make someone get so attached to a supermarket, this is what I thought about. Community is replaced by chain supermarkets dictated by capitalist whims. I feel for that woman grieving a supermarket, because she's actually grieving what felt like a communal space to her, a place she was likely to run into her friends and neighbors while they did their shopping. She became Lucia, obsessed with her supermarket because she can't bear to lose what felt so important to her, while at the same time failing to recognize that she's running from the very reason she loves the store in the first place - the sense of precarity built by running into Allison and her other neighbors at the store. Maybe Allison - or Allison's double - is telling the truth. Maybe Lucia would be so much happier if she let herself become one with the plants, join in a communal lifestyle, instead of fighting for herself, by herself. That's why the cat is such a crucial plot point, why she takes it in even though she knows that's admitting defeat - she can't bear to be alone anymore. That's also why there's a sexual undertone to the story - Lucia's yearning for Allison juxtaposed with "orgiastic plumes of pollen" - queerness, too, is a kind of precarity. It's precarious to admit you need your community.
But at the same time, I didn't want to make the plants Objectively Correct. There's an unreliable narrator for a reason. While I do think this Nextdoor user that I've formed a parasocial relationship with should attempt to throw off the shackles of capitalism, it's not really fair of me to make fun of her, especially when she lives in the extraordinarily expensive city of San Francisco, where the price of groceries really is a concern. Lucia has a lot of questions about how she's going to survive, how she'll make it through another day, and these are circumstances created by her capitalist world but also really not being answered by Allison. WILL it hurt? How much? Will she still be herself? Are the plants a perfect communal It Takes A Village utopia, or will Lucia get left behind there, too? I have my ideas, but I think it's important that Lucia doesn't know. All she knows is her life right now, and how sad and lonely she is, and how it's not sustainable. That's why she doesn't make the decision to go to the plants but rather takes in the cat - it's not about what she's going to do, it's about what she can live with. At the end of the day, we are all precarious. Lucia needs something to take care of.
One last thing! Two songs that I listened to endlessly while revising this story were No More Like That by Eiafauwn and The Flower Called Nowhere by Stereolab. I think they both capture this feeling of being inside and looking out the window on a beautiful Spring day and feeling precarious.
