Vital Information
by Angela Townsend
There are people who love to tell you the bad news. Forty-nine percent of them work for the weather service. They steeple their fingers in an underground lair. Rivulets of drool race down their chins at the first clap of thunder. If they see a cloud the size of a man’s hand, they inform you that tornadoes will leap out of the dark and grab you by the rump. The eschaton is imminent.
There are people who love to tell you the bad news, and then there is Vitaly. I do not know how long Vitaly has worked in the customer service department of Walmart, but his diamond earring previously belonged to Charlemagne. His hairs all stand directly upright, because they are ready.
I see Vitaly when a red screen tells me to stay home. I will not wait in chains for the power to go out. I am Andromeda in a getaway car. If the apocalypse has scribbled my address on the back of its hand, I will not be there when it arrives with a covered dish. I will be at the big box store, where generators guarantee fluorescence and Twizzlers are on sale.
I met Vitaly several tropical depressions ago. While prudent mammals were charging their devices and writhing in front of the forecast, I joined eight sodden daredevils at Walmart. We knew each other’s location by the sound of our sloshing shoes. We were here to reclaim control and compare inferior washcloths. Everything was three dollars and eighty-eight cents, and everything was okay. Walmart has no windows. Walmart has Vitaly, who watches the sky.
“Good day, good woman!”
Before I could request evidence for his assessment, he had taken the sweatshirt from my hand. “Excellent, excellent. Rainbow Brite is the correct choice. Do you need a different size?”
I tried to remember the last time I received confirmation that I had made a correct choice. I fixated on his name tag. “Vitaly.”
“I am he!” Vitaly raised my rainbow over his head.
“That’s a great name.” When the eschaton is imminent, everyone gets a discount on saying what they think. “If you add ‘it’ to the middle, you’re Vitality.”
“Ah, I am ‘it.’”
And I was in the eye. “I think I need a medium.”
Vitaly jaunted behind the Employees Only door. I observed a flotilla of Grape Nuts on the counter. When he returned with my roomier Brite, I had to ask.
“What’s this about?”
“A most perplexing return.” He was wearing cargo shorts the color of Big Bird. Vitaly placed his hands on the surrendered grains. “But it is not mine to judge. The man bought the cereal, the man thought better of the cereal, the man returned.”
“I like cereal.” When thunderheads are forming, nothing is irrelevant.
“Good people always do.” Vitaly folded my sweatshirt in a single glissando. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Make the hurricane go away and keep the lights on.”
Vitaly’s eyebrows convened an emergency session of empathy. “This storm will not bring harm.”
The next time masterminds bloodied the forecast with poetry like “Catastrophic Impact,” I knew what to do. My windshield wipers could not keep up with the rain. I drove half-blind to the sound of Tom Petty agreeing not to back down. The parking lot was sparse. The sky was the color of horseradish.
Vitaly was sneezing in a face mask behind the counter.
“Are you okay?” I didn’t care that he didn’t know me.
“My good woman!” He knew me. “Ah, I have been stricken, but I strike back.”
I raced around the wrinkles of my cerebrum looking for a reason to be here. I realized a reason did not seem requisite. “Can I check out here?”
He spread his hands. “Certainly, but first you need an object.”
“That is the most profound statement I have heard since childhood.”
I left him to find something of great value. I contemplated a Pioneer Woman apron but remembered that my home economics tops out at toaster pastry. I paid homage to yogurt from the isles of Aristotle, now available in Screamin’ Cinnamon flavor, but doubted the persistence of my refrigerator. I settled on a twenty-four pack of shelf stable pudding, fortified with riboflavin.
“I am glad you chose this.” Vitaly lifted the populace of puddings as though conducting transubstantiation. “You are thin. I would have it otherwise. May you enjoy every teaspoon.”
“Do you like pudding?”
“There is little I don’t like.”
“How about power outages?”
Vitaly bagged my Handi-Snacks like frail hatchlings. “I disbelieve in them.” His earring caught the light. “You must always say ‘electricity,’ not ‘power.’”
“You are a prophet.”
Vitaly did not disagree. “I am a tycoon.”
“A tycoon?”
“I have a grandson and a cat. I have swans on the wall of my bathroom.” He gestured into the realm. “I choose between twenty types of Oreos. I like the Triple Stuf.”
“Of course you do.”
He leaned in before his own eyebrows could restrain him. “And I have a gold medal.”
There are times when mortal flesh must keep silence. I nodded, and Vitaly nodded. I put a Great Value bag on my head and ran back to my car, as though frizz mattered. I beheld myself, a noble Jiffy Pop impersonator. I wondered if I had a gold medal, too.
The lights were on when I got home. I tucked the puddings between my flashlights for future red screens. I would be sixty years old before they expired.
Hurricane season ended, and the purveyors of angst and Gore-Tex slithered off to regroup. I let the charge run out of my power banks and stopped worrying about my devices. I did not make it back to Walmart until I ran out of cat treats.
The parking lot was an ant farm, acrobatic with survivors. Children did their own stunts on the backs of carts. Persons of size emerged from hatchbacks singing songs without shame. It was autumn at Walmart, and Armageddon had overplayed its hand. I nearly tripped over a stiff object. On closer inspection, it was a can of Ensure. It had suffered violence. I knew at once that some atomic grandfather had smashed it against his head, and all his hairs gave him a standing ovation.
Vitaly did not see me. He was loading beanbag chairs into a cart.
“Are they silly?” The purchaser of thrones was uncertain. Her hair was the color of a radish, and many planes had taken off and landed at the corners of her eyes. “What’s an old bat like me doing buying teenager décor?”
Vitaly’s hands fell softly on her shoulders. “Beautiful girl, you feather your nest.” He patted the top beanbag like a good pet. “They are full of tiny laughing balls. They will make you happy, and that is it.”
“That is it.” The radish fluoresced.
He spotted me. “Hello, good woman!”
The beautiful girl met my eyes. “Ain’t he sunshine?”
“That’s a fact,” I agreed. I pictured the three of us eating pudding by flashlight on polyester Styrofoam balls. “And he has a gold medal.”
Angela Townsend works for a cat sanctuary, where she gets to bear witness to mercy for all beings. She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Blackbird, Epiphany, Peatsmoke Journal, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her Brooklyn-born poet mother is her best friend.