Jon Reinhardt, a List of Lests | L*STS

      

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A List of Lests

Jon Reinhardt

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other

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• I've passed on another drink I really could have used, 
• lest I should suffer a hangover..
• I've passed on the jalapeño pizza,
• lest I should get heartburn...
• I've skipped dessert, 
• lest I should get fat...
• I've passed on joints, or only pretended to inhale,
• lest it make me paranoid...
• I've left before a party really got going, sometimes with an Irish goodbye,
• lest I should make a drunken fool of myself...
• I've deleted social media from my phone, 
• lest it suck away all my time...
• I've deleted a really witty but mean reply before posting it
• lest I should get into a pointless argument with a random stranger...
• I've made up an email address to get access to an article
• lest I should receive unwanted email spam...
• I've made up a phone number to get a discount code
• lest I should receive unwanted phone spam...
• I've set my alarm on both my phone and on my watch, as well as ordered a wake-up call
• lest I should wake up late...
• I've made list of things I could easily have memorized, made up weird mnemonics to remember things, and scribbled things down in the middle of the night after being awaken by them,
• lest I should forget them...
• I've worn a mask, gloves, and protective eyewear, a hat (including ill-fitting ones), a coat or extra layer, a back brace, aknee wrap, and an elbow wrap
• lest I should become sick, scratched, maimed, sunburned, cold, or hurt...
• I've bought trip insurance
• lest I should have to cancel a trip...
• I've packed a backup pair of glasses, an extra eye mask, earplugs, extra sleeping drugs, and extra adapters, dongles, and cords (though still sometimes the wrong ones) in my carry-on
• lest my checked bag be lost...
• I've changed my flight to a longer layover
• lest my first flight be late...
• I've put secret treat stashes around the house for the cat
• lest the catsitter forget to come and the cat starve...
• I've woken up my cat to say goodbye
• lest she forget me...
• I've gotten to the airport way too early
• lest there be traffic or long security lines...
• I've texted a heart to my partner just before putting my phone into airplane mode
• lest he forget that I love him...
• I've texted 'landed' or the little landing plane icon to my partner immediately after touching down
• lest he worry...
• I've not put my phone into airplane mode, 
• lest I should have to send a final 'I will always love you' message, and the plane should go down, and we should pass a random cell tower that might catch it and relay it to him, so he would always know...

*

The conjunction 'lest', which means 'in case something undesirable happens', is increasingly considered archaic. This is unfortunate because it has a power we are losing in late modern English by triggering the subjunctive mood, reserved for talking about hypotheticals, desires, suggestions, and alternate universes without resorting to the clunky indicative mood. Just by adding a modal like 'should', or by dropping the third person singular -s, we are brought into a space for imagining the best--our unrealized desires and hopes and imagined worlds, or the worst--a safe place to be obsessive, paranoid, or anxious. Nowadays, however, we say things like 'If I was rich', as if we already were, deluding ourselves with the indicative, because let's face it, we'll probably never be rich as we are imagining ourselves, as it were. When we speak, the subjunctive reminds us and whoever hears us that we realize what we're saying is not true, though it might have been, or it might yet be. Imagine the best and the worst, but no worries, it's safely contained grammatically. Long live the subjunctive!

Jon Reinhardt is a middle-aged grammar professor who travels a lot, doesn't take unnecessary risks, and tries not to think about statistical probability, because he is generally lucky. For this reason, he is a big fan of the subjunctive mood and wishes it were not forgotten. He is the Head of the English Department at the University of Arizona. 

Quandra Prettyman, MEMO From: Mommy Date: September 13, 1987 Subject: Some Very Traditional Advice | L*STS

    

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MEMO From: Mommy Date: September 13, 1987 Subject: Some Very Traditional Advice 

Quandra Prettyman

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other

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Money 

• Never lend more than you can give. You can give a stranger five bucks. 
• Don’t lend a friend any amount which the failure to pay would cause a lapse in your friendship. 
• In splitting checks, be willing, if you are in a generous mood, to merely divide the check. Among friends, this usually evens out. 
• But if fellow diners (or users of a mutually bought object) feel specific, then be specific. Don't say "all right, that's your bill" and then pay the tip yourself. 
   

Drink 

• Avoid any liquor without food. 
• Avoid sweet drinks if you get a "feel like drinking" mood;
  you’ll probably consume less. 
  
  

Sex 

• A man who is unconcerned about your becoming pregnant is a man who is unconcerned about you. 
• Use contraceptives. Abandon the notion that a nice woman only has sex when she is out-of-control of her body. 
  
  

Religion (or ethics and moral judgment) 

• A person who does not respect yours is a person who does not respect you. A person who does not respect you is not a friend. 
• When among people who cannot understand what you mean by "no," or a courteous "I'd rather not," find a graceful way to excuse yourself, if possible. Blame the potential of your mother's heart attack, if it will help. Run away, if necessary. 
  
  

Grades 

• Of course, grades matter. But grades really are not, to me, the most important concerns. 
• This is how grades matter to me. It will cause me quite a bit of distress if you fail. I mean fail with a certain specificity, that is, get an F. That's because if your work falls so far short of the expectations held for your peers, it is a signal that something is wrong, seriously wrong, wrong enough to require intervention. 
• D's--you should treat as a very serious warning. 
• This is how grades don't matter to me. From C up is acceptable to me. C's won't get you summa cum laude; if you want to be summa cum laude, that's your cross to bear, not mine. 
• There will be times when you do not do as well as you thought you would or hoped you would. When that happens try not to sweat over it. If you think the teacher really made a mistake, discuss it with the teacher. If you think you didn't understand what was required, ask the teacher to show you a more satisfactory response. Don't waste your time (and the teacher's) by nit-picking. Try to see in what way the other work was better. If you don't think it was, try to see how the teacher may have perceived it as better. 
• There will be times when you feel that you did not do as well as you might have because of peculiar circumstances. Some will be petty--you had a cold, you stayed up too late the night before. Don't let that interfere with your next assignment. 
• There will be times when you were not in full control of the circumstances and made a compassionate decision, e. g., a friend was troubled. When you make such a decision, and I think you ought to do so, be prepared for the consequences. 
  
  

Health 

• Your health has become your responsibility in a special way. True, I have been saying how do you feel, etc. But I have also been around to say that if that's how you feel I'm going to call the doctor. You have to call the doctor now. You have to decide to take an extra day off to recover. You will bear the responsibility for your decision. I hope you will go back to Grades and make a sensible decision; the body you have has to last a lifetime. 
  
  

Mother's Worries 

•  I will worry more about your well-being than about your grades. 
•  I will worry more about your safety than about your choice of friends. 
  
  

Anger 

• These things will make me very angry:
  your failure to tell me that you sick your failure to tell me that you are doing well
  your failure to tell me that you are engaged in some political activity for which there may be serious consequences
  your failure to tell me that you are involved in a relationship of which you think I would not approve.
• I cannot promise you that if you tell me these things that my response will be "OK, so what else is new?" 

*

In keeping with her activities as a collector and informal archivist, Quandra Prettyman was a list aficionado. Her freezer always had a typed list of its rotating contents; her papers include chronologies of yearly activities, and lists of what to buy (with descriptions of the staff) at her favorite stores. Even one of her poems, “Facing Forty Facts,” takes the form of a list. Her intellectual and pedagogical rigor, coupled with her innate hospitality, care, and deep belief in the power of community, made her a safe harbor and model for countless students, particularly Barnard College’s Black community. They remember lessons on effective writing offered in the classroom and life lessons from class dinners in her book-filled apartment with its brilliantly yellow Kitchen.

This memo written by a single mother to her daughter in 1986 is typical of the practical, caring and wry advice she was known for. The Memo form gives the advice an official feel, perhaps softening the blow of letting go and losing daily mother-daughter contact. Now it is a generational document, as her daughter and friends have passed on copies of the letter to other college-bound women.

The late Quandra Prettyman was a poet, an editor, literary critic, reviewer, book collector, teacher, and scholar. Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Prettyman studied history at Antioch College (1950-54) and English at the University of Michigan (1955-57), where she studied 17th century and modernist literature. She joined the Barnard College Department of English in 1971 where, like many women of her generation, she squeezed writing in the spaces between professional life and motherhood. Prettyman edited Out of Our Lives: A Selection of Contemporary Black Fiction in 1975, featuring writers such as Amiri Baraka, Ann Petry, Ernest Gaines, Sherley Anne Williams, and Louise Meriwether. She also authored one of the earliest academic articles on African American cookbooks, “Come Eat at My Table: Lives with Recipes” (1992). Her poems have appeared in multiple collections, including Black Out Loud: An Anthology Poem (1970), The Poetry of Black America (1973), and Black World.

When Prettyman passed away in 2021, she had taught at the College for 50 years and left behind voluminous unpublished works. Most recently, her poems “Late Crape for My Mother” and “Carousel” were posthumously published in Callaloo (Spring 2026).

The Quandra’s Table editorial collective is a group of friends, family, and former students, all connected by fierce affection for the late Professor Quandra Prettyman. The Collective is currently compiling a volume of Prettyman’s unpublished writings, including her poetry sequence, A Safe House. For inquiries, please email Professor Kim F. Hall (quandraprettyman [at] gmail [dot] com) or contact Isabelle Robinson (https://www.isabelle-robinson.com)

Eshani Surya, Many Children Have Thoughts That Bother Them | L*STS

    

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Many Children Have Thoughts that Bother Them

Eshani Surya

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other

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—The tightness on my third-grade teacher’s face, I didn’t understand it until I barreled off the school bus and into my mother’s ramrod center. She kept her arms slack, didn’t hug me when I told her about my day, such a great day. She answered like I should’ve already known, there’s been an accident, though it hadn’t been accident, it’d been four planes. After, there was the footage of the gray smoke, billowing like the skirt of the woman who’d jumped from one of the top-floor windows, as if that was better than burning to death. After, there were conspiracy theories. There were chairs in circles at school, which we sat in to use simple, fragmented language to talk about what happened. There was the footage of the long lines of cars, headlights on, as people tried to escape the city. There was the ritual of throwing my closet open when I was sent upstairs for bed at my father’s house. It was every weekend. It was dark on the tall stairs, dark in the hallway. Quick, I moved quick, to turn on my bedroom’s light, to cast a glow on the white, impassive, double-door closet. Every night I debated with myself, suggested not looking inside. No reason a killer would choose our house to make terror it. No way for him to get in. No chance he would hide in that closet without murdering us first. But then, also, no reason he wouldn’t choose our house, if he had to choose a house at all. No way I shouldn’t scream and alert the rest of our house. No chance I’d succeed, but—

—Twenty-four (or three times eight, or six times four), thirty-six (or six times six, or four times nine), favorite numbers because there were two ways to get there. Favorites, because they repeated. Favorites, because they became so familiar compared to lesser known digits. Favorites, because they stayed. When I was eight, I was fast at the timed multiplication tests slapped down on our desks, but my favorite teacher told my mother that didn’t mean I was good at them. I hadn’t memorized every x times y, just a few key equations. From there, I added and subtracted. It isn’t right, she said. My mother said, What does it matter, if she gets there in the end? They were both wrong. Right was the numbers, waiting for me. Right was their friendship, new, obsessional, in the way I’ve always craved, like girls who can’t talk to each other about anything but their melancholy— 

—Something my therapist and I work on is understanding that fairness isn’t always possible; that what I think is fair might not be fair to another; that fair might not be as fair today as tomorrow; that the way the universe is a loop, not a line, means some things become fair later on, when you least expect it; that the constant sum of fairness would be boring, expected, rote like the end of the alphabet, which is—don’t I know, as a writer—more engrossing when it makes words, or sentences, or paragraphs, or speeches, or poems, or advertisements, or proclamations, or proposals, or abstracts, or eulogies. These are things that weigh heavy in my mouth. My mouth, which I used to think of in two. When the left got a taste, a chew, so too did the right. When the right did, so too did the left. Equal, except when I ran out of bites. Then, in the lack, in the empty space, was apologies, which took the whole mouth to say. My therapist and I work on those too, apologies. I give them too easily, or not at all, depending on whose turn it is to beg, but—

—There were chairs in circles at school, which we sat in to use simple, fragmented language to talk about what happened. There was the footage of the long lines of cars, headlights on, as people tried to escape the—

—Writing came early, as I think it does for most people who still do it regularly, feverishly, into adulthood. What if this, that? What if the story could unspool into whatever direction it wanted to? What if I was allowed to tell a lie, because it was called fiction? What if I was even praised for it? Writing, it was a coping mechanism. It was an act of reclamation. It was terrors, slanted. My mother read every sentence, and she had ideas too. When she suggested a reshaping of a plot, a retooling of a scene, I clamped down, stared off, somewhere away. They were usually good suggestions, but they weren’t mine. What did stolen ideas make my genius? Pale? That isn’t a thing to be known for. My mother talked. I refused to listen. When we were the car, I concentrated my mind out the window, at the blurring pines. When we were at home, it went with the backyard trees that beat with the wind against the sky—

—When I was eight, I was fast at the timed multiplication tests slapped down on our desks, but my favorite teacher told my mother that didn’t mean I was good at them. I hadn’t memorized every x times y, just a few key equations—

—that what I think is fair might not be fair to another; that fair might not be as fair today as tomorrow; that the way the universe is a loop, not a line, means some things become fair later on, when you least expect it—

—I’ve never decided how to pass a knife. As in, in the kitchen, dinner boiling over, if your harried mother, your exacting father, asks you to hand them a knife, does you point it up toward their eyes or down toward their stomach? My wrist is stiff either way. Got it? I say, and don’t let go. Medical advice says to keep the blade lodged in the person who is gored if you hope to save their life. In any case, I’m not the only one who agonizes over violence. When you believe in reincarnation, you discuss generations past, what happened to them. I was told there were two sisters, as close as my mother and I are, in our family. They were murdered, cut to slivers, but they found each other again, through me, through my mother. Safe, now. That’s the story I remember being told, though the details feel misaligned. Do people even say these kinds of things to children? Maybe not, but my mind is good at constructing memories—

—it was a coping mechanism. It was an act of reclamation. It was terrors, slanted. My mother read every sentence, and she had ideas too—

—But they found each other again, through me, through my mother. Safe, now. That’s the story I remember being told, though—

—In my father’s house, I was moved from the upstairs to the basement. My half-siblings were coming, and my family needed my room for them. Below, it was furnished and quiet. No one knew how long I stayed up alone in the swell of night. There, I thought of closets and doors. There, I thought of the fire that overwhelmed my childhood home, when I was four, or five, or the date is somewhat unknown to me, but it happened. To save the rest of the condominium complex, my mother ran back in. I tried to run after her. My father held me back, as he was supposed to. But down here, in the basement, if there were flames, it would be harder to reach the front door. I calculated my routes, imagined the direction of the destruction, how I would respond. Thought about it until I didn’t. Until the basement held too much life for me to manage. There were the new babies. There were the classes, full of despicable, stunning knowledge. There were the friendships and rivalries I’d made, and the politics that came with both. There were the crushes, and their texts, and their shaping of all I thought love could be. There were the lists of schools I dreamed to escape to, then their rejections and acceptances. All at once everything went wrong. All at once everything went right. My hands were full, but never with what I thought they would hold. I hated it. I relished it. Everything was burning already, and there I was—

—There was the footage, as people tried to escape—

—I was fast, but that didn’t mean I was good—

—the universe is a loop, not a line, some things become, when you least expect it—

—an act of reclamation. terrors, slanted—

—Safe, now. That’s the story—

—No one knew how long I stayed up, alone, in the swell of the night—

—The car flipped over. The car backed into a child chalking the driveway. The car drifted into the wrong lane when you fell asleep at the wheel. Driver’s education was meant to enlighten the inexperienced, but I’ve always known that a car is a weapon. Even today, I can’t drive. Behind the wheel, I get headaches. After a practice round of the neighborhood, I weep. I could never drive cross-country on my own. Never off-road. Never summit a mountain. But, once, a therapist was affronted when I told her I wasn’t brave. This, after a series of sessions about confronting the unknown, the uncertain, and knowing I was making the choice to do it. I’m afraid of it, you know, the twelve possibilities of time converging together, the universe’s mystical, violet swirl of moments. But it turns out, that the stars are just benches to rest on, but you can’t sit forever, not if they’re going to metamorphose into black holes. Space is where you’re meant to skid on for most of your days. Space it where you’re meant to live to tell the tale, like it or not—

*

On the Johns Hopkins page about OCD in children, they state, "While many children experience intrusive thoughts or habitual behaviors from time to time, these behaviors are cause for concern when they begin to cause distress for children and their families." From there came this essay: a list of those very obsessive thoughts that should have caused the adults in my life concern, that might have caused it had I talked about them to anyone. When I was diagnosed with OCD in 2022, I found myself desperate to map it onto my childhood self, not as an exploration but as an explanation that I'd obviously always had OCD and thus my diagnosis must be real. My therapist noted that weaponing understanding to prove my OCD was becoming an obsession in itself, as I couldn't handle the uncertainty of what would happen should I learn my intrusive thoughts were actually realities and not symptoms of a mental illness. Today, I feel more able to examine my childhood with curiosity. 

Eshani Surya is the author of Ravishing, which was a Chicago Review of Books and Debutiful Best Debut of 2025, and received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist. Eshani is a Publishers Weekly Writer to Watch, a Finalist for the A.C. Bose Grant for South Asian Speculative Literature, a Mae Fellowship recipient, and a Semi-Finalist for the Key West Literary Seminar’s Marianne Russo Award for Novel In-Progress. Her writing has been supported by the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, the Asian Women Writer’s Workshop and the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, [PANK], Catapult, and Joyland, the anthology, Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. Eshani serves as a board member and instructor at the literary non-profit Blue Stoop in Philadelphia. Find her online @eshanisurya or http://eshani-surya.com. 

Samiha Matin, The Last List | L*STS

     

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The Last List

Samiha Matin

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other

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I know the old geezer who’s about to receive my list of grievances isn’t going to be pleased. You see, there had been a long line all day, full of many clients who arrived with all sorts of grievances, each one superseding the last, no matter how you measured it, and he’d had to go without coffee since noon after the machine collapsed into itself. (I promise you I had nothing to do with it, even as I stood staring at him and the machine for the whole nine hours.) It’s bad enough a job as it is. One room, one desk, no windows.

“Just one sheet?” he says, grabbing my list from my hand as soon as I approach the desk, even before I’ve opened my mouth to say hello. 

“Yup,” I say. “I wrote everything on it.”

“Anything you want to summarize for me before I file it away?” he asks brusquely. “You’ve probably heard from everyone by now. The usual complaints, in the usual order: parents; partners; neighbors; co-workers; bosses. Politicians, of course.”

He turns extra chatty: “They come up all the time, you know, but nowhere near as much as Amazon deliverymen. That’s up everyone’s ass. I had a five-year-old complaining about same-day Prime the other day.”

He suddenly withdraws into himself and mutters, “The old geezer’s never gonna catch a break now.” 

“No, it’s impossible for me to summarize my list,” I say. “I can’t say anything else right now. I must go.”

“What? Why?” he snaps, placing the list squarely in front of him without looking at it. “What makes you so goddamn special that you’ll say nothing to anyone and just leave like that?”

“Because—because—I don’t want to bother anyone—”

“Because you think you’re so much better than everyone?” he says at the same time, staring up at me with watery-blue eyes. He narrows them, and they suddenly disappear. “Is it the irrepressible work ethic and sanctimonious attitude that keep you at bay? Is that it, sweetheart? Rest assured, everyone’s playing that trump card these days. My book’s full of the same old shit about how every person in here imagines they’re the last person in the universe who can be blamed.”

“No. No! Why don’t you take a good look at the list first, you old fool, before preaching your horse manure to me? Alright?”

After he finishes reading the one glaring word on there, I make a grand gesture with both hands. It mimics an explosion. A supernova. Gravity clenching my fingers. Tearing my hands apart. As far from each other as possible.

“What the hell does that mean?” he says. “And this?” He’s waving the paper like a flag.

“Everything. Everything,” I respond. “Everything’s a grievance right now.”

And then I reach across the desk and take the list back from his ancient hands and put the whole thing into my mouth. I start biting down as hard as I can. The paper tears itself into smaller and smaller and even smaller bits, until it’s all dust and atoms and silvery star powder inside my mouth once again. 

*

I was very interested in writing lists, even if mine ended up contrarian: just a word, encompassing everything and nothing at once. I’m not sure how to interpret the story myself. This might be the first draft of a larger short story I can write. I’ve been bogged down in bureaucratic quagmires for a while, so that was obviously an inspiration. I was also looking at an old draft of a villanelle about parallel worlds and listening to N.W.A., so in extremely odd ways, as usual, this list (or anti-list) came about.

Samiha Matin is a full-time writer of literary and popular fiction, with proficiency in poetry, non-fiction, and scholarly essays. She holds degrees from the University of Michigan, the University of Arizona, and the University of North Texas, where she is working on her PhD in Creative Writing. Her favorite place in the world is the Laniakea Supercluster.

Sharon Wahl, Cats of the Alameda Colony | L*STS

    

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Cats of the Alameda Colony

Sharon Wahl

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other

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In the summer of 2010 we rented a house on Alameda Street, in Tucson. Driving down the alley behind the house, the day we moved in, we saw five kittens. The following spring, these kittens and their mother produced 31 more kittens. 31 kittens! One morning I woke up at dawn and the kittens were in our back yard, climbing the mesquite and palo verde trees, napping on the hammock, chasing each other everywhere, in a pastel early-morning light that made it all look like a fairy tale. 

Harlequin was the original mother. The kitten mothers were Powder Blue, Tidbit, Hisser, and Gray Ghost. 

Tidbit gave birth in Jonathan's editing studio. We had a film in the Tribeca Film Festival that spring, but Jonathan said if the kittens weren't born by then, he wouldn't go. The kittens came just in time: Ziggy, Ewok, and Bear. 

Ewok was adopted by a deaf woman. Bear was adopted by friends who moved with her to Washington, D.C. Ziggy Marley Stardust became Jonathan's studio cat. 

So many kittens. Lady Grey, Thomas, Cigarette, Commander Shadow, Marilyn, The Dudes, Tiny Orange, Coco, Shy Kitty. . . 

Brother, the brother of the mothers, was an orange cat who was great friends with cream and white Shy Kitty. The two of them walked side by side, leaning into each other, with the tips of their tails intertwined. Really, they did. 

Buffalo came to mate with the females, the only male who stayed. Descendent of mountain lions, his headbutts knocked you over. But he always made sure all the others ate first. 

They napped in the shade, in the sparse shadows of palo verde, mesquite, and Texas sage. They were the shadow kitties. 

They played with rocks. Rocks of a particular shape, round, smooth, almost flat, about three inches in diameter. A cat would lie on its back with a rock on its stomach and attack it, furiously, with all four paws. 

In the fall, we caught and spayed or neutered all the cats. All but one, Grey Ghost, who escaped every trap we set for her, and died in childbirth the following spring. 

Our third year renting that house, the landlord decided to replace the roof. This took several days, and on one of those days, while the roof was open to the sky, Hisser went in to explore. When the workers finished the job, Hisser was still inside. We knew she was inside because we heard her howling to get out. We called our landlord and told him we wanted to hack a hole in the wall where we thought we heard her. He agreed. We hacked a hole in the wall, but Hisser didn't come out. She was trapped in the attic. So we went into the attic crawlspace, hacked a hole in the insulation, placed bowls of water and tuna next to it, inside a Have-a-heart trap, and we got her. Yay! But within a week, she died. I could speculate, but I don't know what killed her. 

Powder Blue, a calico with pale blue eyes, was the colony's High Priestess. When we moved across the street, four years later, we carried her over and showed her the fenced-in patio, the unkempt back yard. She never went back. The others followed. 

Our new neighbor complained that the cats pooped in his garden. So we closed them in. We built a wood and chicken-wire enclosure alongside the house, with a chicken-wire tunnel onto our porch. 

In summer, the cats took turns napping by the front door. The door wasn't fitted properly into the door frame, and there was a space under it wide enough for the A/C to escape onto the backs of cats pressed against it, two at a time, tail to tail. Kitty A/C, we called it. 

That February, a scrawny black cat showed up. We didn't think he was one of ours, one of the two black kittens who'd gone off to conquer their own territories years ago, but he showed up as though he was coming home. He slept alongside the colony enclosure for a week before we let him in, getting beat up each night, his head covered in cuts old and new. Leo was named for Leonard Nimoy, Mr. Spock, one of my childhood mentors, who died that month, on February 27, 2015. 

Now, in 2026, there are three cats remaining: three elderly cats, Powder Blue, who came inside of her own volition during the summer of 2017, and is now, at this very moment, sleeping in our bed; and two of her kittens, who live outside, Coco (one of the untouchables) and Shy Kitty (a total lush, who, every morning when we go out to feed her, would rather be petted than eat). 

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(Powder Blue)

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When we rented the house on Alameda Street, the landlord asked if we would feed a group of five feral cats he'd been feeding for a couple years. If you feed these cats, he told us, other cats won't come into the yard. Ha! The mother of the five kittens next door knew when we put out food each day, and she taught her kittens where the food was, and her five kittens taught their thirty-one kittens. What surprises me most, thinking back on this time, is how easily, how unquestioningly we accepted responsibility for this large group of creatures. There they were, in our yard. They were hungry. So we fed them. Some we tamed, others, in 16 years, we never touched. One of us was a cat person, one of us preferred dogs. But there they were. We didn't seek them out, they just showed up. We never questioned that they were ours.  

Sharon Wahl's collection Everything Flirts: Philosophical Romances (Iowa, 2024) won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award and was longlisted for the 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her writing has appeared in many publications, including Harper's (Readings), The Iowa Review, the Chicago Tribune, Wigleaf, JMWW, Harvard Review, and the Florida Review. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and is online at sharonwahl.com and @swahl922. "Cats of the Alameda Colony" will surely find a place in her book-in-progress, Character Flaws. 

Nicole Walker, * | L*STS

     

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Nicole Walker

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other

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Avery Gregurich, Regarding The Grocery Lists Of Others | L*STS

     

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Regarding The Grocery Lists Of Others

Avery Gregurich

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other

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“We enter such

brilliance as we entered

the world, without

shopping list, perfectly.”

Denis Johnson, “The Supermarkets of Los Angeles”

*

No it is not joy and it is not pride and is not relief that I am feeling now as I sit cross-legged on the carpet in the attic and leaf through a reusable shopping bag full of other people’s grocery lists. 

I am here sorting the lists by size and paper type, color, legibility, and lastly, by their contents. There's  about twelve and half years of found or stolen scraps and little notes and photographs and other written ephemera collected during my shifts at the grocery store. I've moved this bag several times across Iowa without a proper design for why.  I take them out once or twice a year, each time turning them over in my hands, sorting them, thinking of doing something with them, giving up and eventually putting them back down into the bag and returning it to hang from a hook in the attic. I am careful with the lists. Some are written in pencil and I try not to smudge the graphite with my thumbs. 

Ridiculous, this life and all the possible others.

I arrange them on the scanner and compare the various effects of their layouts, deciding how to best display them. I am trying to make images capable of sparking some explanation suitable to both of us as to why I’ve collected and kept them and continued on thinking about them over the years. 

Do you also recognize in the lists your own repetitions and patterns? What you eat and how you write. What your life and diet look like. In language. Part of why I keep them is because I am soothed by them. Or at least by this act of collecting them. Cataloging them. Preserving them. For who? You?

What is the grocery list if not a kind of half-assed hex spooled out against the tide, a brazen plea for manifestation? By limiting the absolute possibility that the modern grocery store allows, the list creates a uniform reality, bridging the present with the only future still worth planning a meal for: the immediate one. I imagine that the grocery list is about the only time most people still write by hand with only themselves as intended audience. 

I am most drawn to the lists because of these deep intimacies, preserving how we each talk to ourselves in these individual languages. How this might look to a stranger. The way we write so that we will remember exactly what we believed we needed when we set it down in ink and shoved off again into the lancing void. 

The list represents a specific time before, spent somewhere else, and after asking others or most often simply by ourselves to actually think about what it is that we absolutely need, it is the things here on these lists. Things wanted, specifically, and this is important, what it was they wanted from me.

It shouldn’t surprise, how similar all the lists are. Despite all our desperations, we should find any comfort we can in knowing that when each of us is hungry and asked to imagine time in the short term, we all believe that we will need milk, eggs, and pasta. Mostly. Sometimes ice cream. Often booze. Some are even written on sheet music or notepads with butterflies. 

The lists catalog, often in boring or incomprehensible ways, the literal fuel of our lives. By its nature the grocery list implies life itself, or a desire to continue living on, into the impending void.  Each list represents starting points of reality, points of convergence and departure towards eventual meals and work lunches and holidays.  (The lists all take on a frenzied tone in the holiday season.  Uppercase letters. Things underlined. URGENCY.) 

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Remember: what’s gathered here in this reusable shopping bag are only the things that made it all the way through the shift, found themselves tucked into a pocket and driven back home and taken inside, all the way up the stairs and stashed here, inside this bag in the attic. I shudder to think of the lists lost along the way.

The bag was the first thing that they handed me when I “set sail” with the company. At orientation, I was shown where they kept the splinter kits, supplied five company t-shirts, a boxcutter, two nametags, and a handbook that’s still in here, along with every pen I’ve ever taken, about seventy-five black Sharpies, a pin button that says, “WHAT IN THE HELL IS A LYNCHBURG LEMONADE?” and some citrus cough drops turned chalky sweet with age and attic heat. I started putting the lists in immediately after I started there. I carried the bag into every shift for several years. Sometimes coworkers would find lists or more strange things and hand them over to me, surely embarrassed on my behalf.

I started work there the same day as a guy who claimed to be Hemingway's grandson. It was among the first things he ever told me. Somebody we worked with dug around later and told me that his story checked out, but I remained suspicious from that first day when I pulled into the parking lot we shared with a Red Robin and a Skechers and found him laying flat on his back asleep on the roof of his car.

People used to go every month to his apartment and watch wrestling pay-per-views. So many went that it affected the schedule. I have never read any of his writing, but I remember seeing several pictures of him in his apartment bathroom, posed naked in a bathtub full of blood. Had to be Hemingway's grandson.

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Some lists include daily/weekly  itineraries, which is a dangerous tactical decision, life-wise. If the list is lost, of course then so is the day’s schedule of events which for the type of people still writing out grocery lists by hand can be a terrible burden. 

Here's one of my favorites, a small piece of yellow legal pad, horribly wrinkled with the desired items printed out softly in black ink. It says this person needed to buy “slice cheese”, container chicken feed, and some kind of fruit. (See, it just says “Fruit.”) Beneath that, a plan of attack for the day ahead in America, sometime between 2014 and now.

After an hour spent each at Walmart and Petco, and a haircut at 12:30, this person had penciled themselves in some time for MERCY. 

A few missing lists, either real or imagined deep enough as to be made real: 

● Some pantry staples written out over the results of an STD test, (positive: chlamydia)

● Every religious pamphlet or business card or political screed I’ve ever been handed myself or else intentionally left behind for me to deal with. I remember one of them still used Michael Jackson’s death as a call for spiritual repentance a decade on.

This little Bible filled with verses of “COMFORT, ASSURANCE, SALVATION” showed up yesterday. It made it home in my pocket and that’s as far as it went. Scared I would lose it to the washing machine like so many others, I texted Sara quick from inside the produce cooler: 

“There is a tiny Bible in the pocket of my pants on the kitchen chair. Can you save it for me?”

● A fake $50 bill. Once I found one of the customer bathrooms covered in fake $50 bills. They were tucked beneath the toilet seat, behind the mirror, sticking out the top of the baby changing station. The whole thing reeked of absurd libertarian zealotry, and sure enough, the messages on the bills traced back to an anti-government/abortion group head-quartered in one of the Dakotas. I remember taking one home. It has not survived.   

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The grocery list traces back to an ancient form, the contents of which have been increasingly converted down to smaller and smaller quantities until it has reached its current scale: the items needed to sustain everyone’s individual homes. How many documents still exist like this? 

I’ve trained hundreds of people to run a register by now. I always tell them that the list is a natural way to start a conversation with the customer. I tell them this because somebody told me that my first few times behind the line. Repetition begets more of itself. I am relieved everyday that most of what I say at work have never been my words at all.

“Are you all through with your list?” I ask after I find one buried at the bottom of a basket. How to name this small shame that I see, watching their faces change when I mention it, perhaps knowing I’ve seen something already not meant for me? Their handwriting or how they write to themselves or worse yet, how someone else writes to them. That I’ve seen what they wanted when they came in here and what they are leaving with now and that I hold judgement for the difference between the two. 

“Hey, this is a judgement free zone,” I say to them, gesturing with my hands, indicating the space around my body.

I've noticed that even if the lists have served their function, (or they have been given up on,) and balled up and forgotten in there, still most people elect to take it with them when I ask, usually offering some “I better double check it” line or something similar. 

Even in its absence, the proverbial list comes up as a form of conversational currency. A bit of language we can share. “I only had two things on my list” or, the inverse, “I forgot my list at home.”

“Looks like you went rogue.” I say to both and am met with appropriately measured laughter and an awkward silence I usually don’t care enough to puncture until it’s receipt time.

*

I’m troubled by the photographs that I have collected and kept. Scanning them, sharing them here feels particularly invasive. To my eye, none of the same people are in any of the pictures, yet the effort remains coordinated. I found them all within a four month stretch. My greatest sin remains my ability to conflate anything, even the appearance of an avocado.

Anyway, the photos are here and if you find yourself in any of them, know that all were found tucked behind chocolate bars on racks close to the cash registers or tossed into a trash can at either one of  two grocery stores in Iowa. You yourself or someone else deemed these photographs of you not worth keeping, or perhaps, not worth keeping better track of. Please know that I am sorry for all of this. 

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I’m here to report from the front lines that the grocery list is fading, that the last few years have been particularly brutal to the creation of paper grocery lists, hand-written and held and referenced throughout the shopping trip. During the pandemic, most of the lists switched over to the phone and the habit has stayed. It is rarer and rarer when and if I find them these days.

The week I start writing this essay, lists start showing up again. 

At the register. Left in carts. Cast aside out in the parking lot.

Last week I was collecting carts in the rain without a hi-viz vest, (career suicide, a real cardinal sin out in the retail wars,) and I found a sogging stapled stack of hospital discharge papers laying in the cart corral.

Of course I pocket them, take them around the back of the store behind a rattling cart of empty glass bottles that I'm to feed into the dumpster, and there, in the space between the trash bins where the last people still smoking cigarettes gather, I open up her medical records. 

Ashley's.

How hungry we are for other people’s secrets! Shameless, this curiosity. The crooked shape of its teeth. A convenient excuse for my poorer behaviors.

Everything that you really want is in there. Under a section titled “Your Latest Vitals,” the parts of Ashley that could be measured and explained are listed and paired with a small illustration: her blood pressure, paired with a tiny heart holding a pressure gauge in its middle: 97/81; her temperature sat next to a tube thermometer and four floating lines: 98.4 °; her respiration as demonstrated by the top half of a torso and lungs, exhaling air, curling back on itself :18. 

A measure of health, I think, standing there between two trash bins in the place we all call Cancer Corner. I flip the page. It takes four more turns to gather and display the entirety of her current medication regiment. I flip back to find a date of birth and notice that she is young, just turned 40 last November. Younger than my Sara. 

Today’s visit is in advance of an “invasive ductal carcinoma of breast” to be done on August 7.  

Breast cancer. 

Her post operation care instructions round out the records. Important dates are highlighted in yellow, presumably right there in the exam room. Won’t you go there with me? Ashley is sitting there on the butcher paper, and Dr.___ is talking to her and holding a tired yellow highlighter. Dr.___ is telling Ashley how to care for herself, for her new body once parts of her current body have been removed. Two Jackson Pratt drains will remain in place, to be emptied daily and recharged as instructed. A list of symptoms are listed as being reason enough to immediately seek out the emergency room.  

I am thinking now about Ashley and whether she was supposed to keep these papers safe for three weeks before her surgery. What it must be like to be already informed of future care for a procedure that hasn’t happened yet. How it will go for me some day.

Ashley _____: 7/23/2026 

I’ve got no proof of this one save for this story. “Excuse me” a man in his seventies says. He’s tracked me down in front of the dairy box, straightening yogurts.

He held up his phone to me, started scrolling through many messages from his girlfriend. He was careful to say it: girl-friend. He wanted me to understand the severity of the situation. I’m sure if you asked him the last time he’d had a girlfriend, he would say that she’d become his wife.  He had his phone set to 1,000 pt. font and he moved through the messages with large sweeping finger strokes, down towards his chest to move backwards in time, then back up away again to bring it all closer again. To double check. For a freckle of a moment each swipe his finger would wind up in a crooked point straight ahead or down into the ground. 

His girlfriend had sent him photos and exact product names, some with the SKU numbers typed out. I could see that he was in a genuine fear of failing her, so I knew this was a second act of some kind, maybe one of the last men who never learned to grocery shop by himself, and now, widowed or divorced here in the late innings, he was trying to . This one would require my best effort.

He started pointing at pictures and off through the store we went in search of ground turkey, peanut butter, the works, and at the end, probably ten minutes spent together, we stopped at the end of the cereal aisle and counted and checked everything over again and it all looked exactly right. He even shook my hand and thanked me in earnest, and you can trust me because I am nothing if not in the business of “thank yous,” of vapid pleasantries, of saying and receiving those meaningless words so often that I have become arrogant in believing that I know when someone actually means it.  

I headed back over to the dairy box, pulling gallons forward. I made it to the little cartons of goat milk, and I heard it again: “Excuse me.” 

I turn to face the man. We're back here almost exactly where we started out from. He has the phone up again and l smile and give him a little wave because we have made it so far already together and I’m actually rooting for the guy now because he’s really trying to get everything right, again making me believe it’s in deference to a new love, and he looks me in the eye and asks me brutally, with full eye contact and without mercy: “Do you work here?”

My mother told me recently that when I was small and still sat up in the kid’s seat of the shopping cart, I would reach out towards the cash register and say “Bits.” 

“Bits, Bits. Bits.” 

She said I only ever said that word around cash registers and a little plastic Fisher Price typewriter. That should explain something about all of this, but I cannot say for certain what. I still have it here, that toy typewriter. 

For my mother: Now, when kids stay in the seat and ride behind the register, those who go through my line when it is still early, before it is busy and I still possess most of my faculties, I will point at the register and say “See the bits!” and I let them hit a few buttons before sending them on back around to their parents.

On and on it goes. Another paper bag to fill. Truck to unload. List to keep.

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The Last Grocery List I Ever Keep

has lard written on it/uses a 

looping cursive/ comes on 

the back of an envelope that 

the power bill arrived in/

contains my mother's 

capital G/smells of pocket coin 

and striped peppermints /gets tucked 

and forgotten in the glovebox 

a winter long/ shows up on

a sunday morning wearing

scars, doodles of an absent mind/

hell I wouldn’t mind a 

coffee stain, a bible verse, 

any other kind of

 forgiveness

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This essay/list climbed out of a shopping bag full of other people’s grocery lists. I've collected them for years during my shifts. Spent the better part of August writing it. Throughout I tried to make sense of them, of collecting the lists and keeping them close. What I think they mean. It winds up with a poem about the last grocery list I'll ever keep. I pray I never find it. 

Avery Gregurich lives and writes in eastern Iowa, and organizes The Out Of Towners Reading Series.