Getting Down in Frisby Mart
Angela Townsend
Some scholars devote their best years to the study of supermarket music. If ever you find yourself awash in well-being while comparing the unit price of spinach, they have not lived in vain. They missed tee-ball playoffs and silver anniversaries to optimize the ambience of the dairy aisle. They gave their all, at great personal cost.
The management of Frisby Mart does not care.
Let the supermarkets sift through studies. Frisby Mart is not a supermarket. Frisby Mart is a grocery store. If you offered any given Frisby one billion dollars for the right to open a second Frisby Mart, they would insert you in the Lil Shopper wagon sized for toddlers and send you on the ride of your life into the parking lot.
If Frisby Mart was a supermarket, someone in Corporate would make them listen to scholars. Every heart in the Frisby flotilla would sink. It is of no interest to any Frisby that classical music increases sales of wine, or that one hundred beats per minute, administered at precisely forty decibels, facilitates browsing.
But there is no Corporate peering down peer-reviewed noses at Frisby Mart. There are only eight aisles, a cappuccino machine that Zeke Frisby bought off a guy, and whatever hymnody the senior Frisby on duty saw fit to feed you today.
The first rule of supermarket music is to avoid offending your constituency. Know your demographic. The after-church crowd responds well to Celine Dion and persons named Paul. Boomers dig that Neil Diamond song where he whines that no one will listen to him, not even the chair. Get them pensive and they will buy more waffles. The Beatles are well received, although Ringo’s solo work has been correlated with decreased sales of detergent.
Or, go to Frisby Mart, where you can hear War Pigs twice in a row because Jed Frisby did not get his air guitar right the first time. Let Shop-Rite keep Rod Stewart and the Eagles. For a good time while spelunking for unbruised apples, let Flip Frisby treat you to “Mr. Boombastic,” complete with the poetry, “you am the bun and me am the cheese.”
If Zig Frisby is upstairs, expect explorations in theology. Stop n’ Shop would never have the nerve to play Billy Idol. But at Frisby Mart, you can grapple with whether the woman in the Tweety Bird sweatshirt is included in the observation, “every single one of us has the devil inside.” You will get a free bag of Frisby Fries and a complimentary slap on the buttocks if the security cameras catch you getting down with your bad self to “Dancing With Myself.”
Meat Loaf is of particular interest to Frisbys. Not only are Mr. Loaf’s songs reliably eleven minutes in length, but they also give the impression that the apocalypse is imminent if you do not return his affection. This is why all Frisbys are under contract to increase the volume to one hundred fifty decibels in the event of a Meat Loaf song. They may go to one hundred seventy to make sure you hear that “the angels had guitars even before they had wings.”
The Frisbys may choose the soundtrack for their own pleasure, but at heart they are here for the community. As the last independent grocer in the county, they bear a sacred trust. There must still be some places in this world where strangers can hear Jimmy Buffett louder than the robot voice in the self-checkout.
If that disembodied despot tells you one more time to move your small potatoes to the bagging area, five Frisbys will manifest like unwashed seraphs. They will make sure you get your tubers at two hundred beats per minute. They will dance with one another and everyone in earshot. They may even give you a cup of cappuccino for your trouble, if the machine is working, although don’t count on that.
Angela Townsend is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, seven-time Best of the Net nominee, and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Epiphany, Five Points, Indiana Review, The Normal School, Pleiades, SmokeLong Quarterly, Terrain, and Under the Sun, among others. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College and writes for a cat sanctuary.