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Strange Horizons - The Wisdom of the Galaxy By Will McMahon

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Fiction

Size / / /

The Wisdom of the Galaxy

By: Will McMahon

Issue:

29 June 2026

2687 words

Content warning:<br>Show warnings<br>This page contains:<br>Animal cruelty/death

When 2008 hit and I got laid off from Circuit City, a friend of mine managed to get me work at the local supermarket deli. It was a shit job, but I was beyond grateful at the time.

Interesting people work at the deli, or at least they did then. Ty was 6’4” and maybe 150lbs, the loud-mouthed stoner to my reserved stoner—that is to say, my best friend and the reason I had a job. Chester was something of a loner, with this long, greasy mullet, but was friendly enough. Tina was a punk rocker just here until her band made it on tour, with bright pink hair and anarchist tattoos. And then there was Roz, a quiet, middle-aged guy with thick glasses and a crew cut, whose nickname was short for Roswell, on account of the fact that he claimed he was being abducted by aliens.

The worst part of the job was the customers, who were entitled beyond belief and hardly seemed to view us as human (the feeling was mutual). Complaining about them was a favored pastime of Tina, Ty, and myself. Chester was more polite, to his credit, and Roz had his head in the stars. He worked Sunday to Thursday, and, every Thursday evening, he’d say goodbye to us in case the aliens decided to take him away for good that weekend, in which case he wouldn’t be able to come into work Sunday because he’d be on a ship hundreds of light-years away, learning the wisdom of the galaxy. We’d wish him bon voyage and see him again Sunday morning.

Our store manager Mike was, generally speaking, an asshole. Already a petty tyrant, the recession really juiced him up. There was a constant line of people in front of his office, begging for jobs; that kind of thing goes to a guy’s head. Ty had slipped me in because Mike somehow thought he was a good worker, but Mike’s asshole nature was well-remarked upon in the deli, and the rituals of light hazing I endured as the new guy usually centered around throwing me into conflict with him. The most frequent of these was stealing lemons from the produce section. Residue would build up in the deli’s ancient cheese slicer, and if you didn’t clean it out it would jam up. The cleaning gel was bright blue and noxious and took fifteen minutes to break down the gunk, and meanwhile the line would back up with customers losing their shit. The bootleg solution, then, was to run a couple lemons through the slicer; the acid cut right through the cheese residue, and we were back online within a minute or two.

Mike hated the lemon trick, claiming it damaged the machine. I don’t know if that was true, but, as far as we were concerned, the sooner that piece of shit broke down for good, the better. In the meantime, the lemons were the only things keeping us sane. Mike was always on the prowl, and he’d make sure to do his rounds coming through produce on the way to the deli, trying to catch us. He used to watch on the security cameras too, but Roz had figured out a way to sabotage the one near the deli and after that no one had been able to fix it. We asked him how he’d done it, and he just gave us this look like we didn’t want to know.

So, this one day, Chester’s late for work and we’re drowning. A customer is arguing with Tina about how many meatballs she put on his sub, and she’s holding her ground, so Ty sidesteps the whole situation to take the woman next in line, who proceeds to order two pounds of Swiss, sliced thin. Roz is battling it out with the cheese slicer, muttering something about barbaric technologies, and I’m dispatched for aid from heaven—which is to say, the lemons. I’m practically sprinting back with an armful when I collide with Chester, who is coming in two hours late, red-faced and crying.

Like I said, Chester was a bit of a loner, but he did have one friend outside work—this little green parrot. I say outside work, but he brought Oscar in sometimes when he picked up a shift in the back and didn’t have to wear a hairnet. The bird would sit on Chester’s shoulder and hide in his hair, though there was little risk of discovery as Mike rarely checked the stockroom unless there was a reason. Oscar liked doing that with Tina too, when we’d take breaks to go say hello, but apparently wasn’t a fan of people with shorter hair, since the one time Chester put him on me, he bit my ear.

Pretty much everyone liked to play with Oscar, except for Roz, who would just hang back and watch. I didn’t give it much thought, until one time we were having a slow morning and I asked Roz what the aliens looked like, and he glanced at me like I was an idiot and said “birds.” “They’re birds?” I’d...