The Bodyguard ("Recognition" -- story #23)

RECOGNITION
by Michael Kroetch

The bodyguard is leaving the supermarket. His hands are caked with cookie crumbs. Many more are inside him. He is thinking about them. He stands in the supermarket’s doorway waiting for it to open up and release him to the outside world. No one said anything to him the whole time he was in the store and now he is ready to leave, only the door does not seem to see him enough to open itself and let him through. He waves his hand up in front of its sensor. Nothing happens. The bodyguard begins to worry about this. He needs to go out. Why won’t the door recognize him? He looks up at its sensor with a threatening expression and talks aggressively into the wire in his ear. He tells the wire he needs a team to come in and take the door out of the equation. Then he glowers at the door. And waits. But still, nothing happens.

He continues to wait until a pimpled kid in a blue apron with the store’s logo on it comes up behind him and coughs. The kid nervously stares at the bodyguard, then points down to the floor where a handmade sign has fallen. It says “out of order” and advises its readers to use the other exit. The kid picks up this sign and presses its tape against the electronic glass door with the heel of his fist. Then, because the bodyguard still hasn’t moved, the kid looks over at him again and smiles an even more desperate smile and points twice to the door at the other side of the store. But the bodyguard still doesn’t move or make any kind of smile in reaction to that of the kid. So the kid’s shoulders pinch together and his eyes get huge as he lowers his head, looks at the ground, and walks quickly with a wide soundless stride toward the jumbo sacks of dogfood by the manager’s small glassed-in room.

The bodyguard watches him go. He can feel the oatmeal crumbs tingling on the tips of his fingers. There is something erotic about it. It reminds him of being in his church’s doorway as a child. After dipping his fingers in the cistern full of holy water and wanting to lick them clean, but knowing very well what would happen if he did.