Bagged
How to use ordinary things for extraordinary means, Part 1.
In a small corner store in a busy city in the darkness of the late night, there is a woman with her own panties over her shoulders, considering an aisle of bags.
Plastic bags. Sandwich bags, quart bags, snack bags, gallon bags. Things being offered in place of bags, such as beeswax wrap or reusable silicone pouches. The sheer magnitude of the choices there are to contain our various objects is mind-boggling. She’s almost physically reeling with the decision, putting a hand out onto the shelves to steady herself from the internal spin.
Bags. So many bags. The woman decides the beeswax and silicone pouches would not do — these corner store varieties are not the best versions of these things, and the main purpose of tonight is not to be environmentally friendly. She moves past the greener choices and onto the more typical choices, the ones with the juxtaposition of purpose that is them being really good at postponing degradation while in use but when finally discarded, causing problems because they themselves cannot degrade. Being still overwhelmed by her choices, she reaches out and opens a box.
She does it before she even knows she’s doing it but really it’s the only way to make the decision. She has to feel the thing she will be buying to preserve the thing that is literally weighing on her shoulders. Once she has the first box open, she knows she made the right choice. The generic zippered gallon bag she removed from the box first feels flimsy, the zipper closure on top skipping every few centimeters on the imperfections of the track. She stuffs it back in the box and ignores the rest of the zippered closures. She opens one of the bags with the regular seals that changes color when you press both sides together. Again, the bag feels flimsy, although the seal makes a satisfying noise alerting you to the closure, almost like Rice Krispies. She stuffs it back in the bag. She’s on the right track.
How much easier would it be if there was a form letter, with directions on what to use to preserve evidence, like when you go to the airport? Or camp? Dear Operative, it would begin, because that’s what she is. Are you ready to change the world one shitty man at a time? Are you ready to be part of tearing the fabric of our patriarchal society in two, then knitting it back together with a new world order where women are considered equal and men don’t make the rules? Then here’s how to properly hand in your evidence!
This is where they would name the right bag, and tell you how to squish all the air out of it to avoid oxygen ruining your chances at retribution, and tell you what to write on the bag so everyone knows what you did, but in code, so if anyone who isn’t an operative finds the bag, they don’t know what you’re up to.
She snaps out of her reverie, back to the reality where she is in a corner store past midnight looking dishevelled and the clerk is looking at her, trying to decide if he should come over and make sure that she’s okay. She gives the briefest of smiles, but not too much eye contact, and the clerk remains behind the desk. The door makes a clink sound as someone comes in, but not down the bag aisle.
She returns back to considering the bags. No zip top, seal top. Not these, too flimsy, she thinks, mulling over the options in her head. She sees it, just as she’s about to give up and walk out, the word she thinks will make the difference. Freezer. She opens the box and feels the plastic. Tough, to built to withstand freezer burn, the box says. She takes the box and heads to the bathroom, then doubles back to hide the other opened boxes behind the antifreeze next to the bags.
Once in the bathroom she looks at herself in the mirror. She swipes the hair out of her eyes and smoothes it down with some water from the tap. She takes her hair out of the bun and redoes the style, or anti-style, catching all the stray hairs and sweeping them up into hair-tie prison. She takes the paper towel, wets it, and fixes her eyeliner smudges and removes the red lipstick bleeding off her lips and onto her skin.
It’s then that she sees the underwear, and briefly panics. Why did I not remove those when I came in? She thinks. She starts to mentally berate herself but stops — she has a task to complete and it’s getting late.
She grabs the underwear, hikes up her skirt and puts one leg on the toilet, wiping what remains beneath her skirt and then, holding them aloft, realizes she needs both hands to open the bag, and places the panties on her shoulder again, almost angrily freeing the bag from its box, annoyed that she’s not better at this. How can she help smash the patriarchy if she can’t handle order of operations?
The panties come back off her shoulder, and are finally safe in the bag. She seals it most of the way, squishes all the air out, then seals it the rest of the way. She runs her pinched fingers over the entirety of the seal two more times just to make sure it’s fully closed, checks her face in the mirror, smoothes her skirt,and leaves.
She sneaks out of the store and turns right, then turns right at the corner, heading down an alley that looks just like any other alley in the city, stopping at a door that looks like all of the other graffiti covered doors in the city, except for one image. Right over where the peephole would be, there is a fist, one that she imagines is raised in resistance, attached to the body of an angry woman, part of a sea of other angry women. This is how she knows it’s the right door. She knocks and waits.
The door opens eventually, and she hands over her bag, air tight and labeled. The eyebrows of the woman at the door raise in response to the label. “Nice. We haven’t been able to get this from him yet. Really nice.” The door shuts.
The woman waits five minutes before she realizes no one is coming back, then walks away, almost mad but too tired and cold to get there fully. Before she reaches the end of the alley she gets a text with information on the time and place of the next meeting. I’m in, she thinks with a grim but satisfied smile. Now I just have to survive until then.
© Ashley Jamele 2020
