Ish

I spend a fair amount of time at the grocery store.  Interactions manifesting human nature unedited  often happen in the mundane aisles of our modern temples to food.   Today, while smashed between fifty new flavors of gum and three rows of periodicals claiming to have new tips on everything from sex to crock pot meals, I enter the usual checkout line coma.

“How are you today ma'am?,”  I hear an elderly man ask the cashier as he puts his fifth frozen chicken pot pie on the conveyor belt.

Long black hair, recently refreshed with dye from Aisle 6, flips across the register. 

“Good...ISH, ” replies the cashier drawing out the ISH as if begging to be known by another human being.

Across the man's face deep wrinkles twitch in perplexity as I slide my plastic divider behind his frozen cuisine on the moving belt.

Dropping my bag of lentils precariously close to our plastic border protecting anything that might be HIS from that which will soon become MINE, I bite her hook.  "That's a loaded ISH," I say.

“Well, I lied once to my mother.  It was a lesson of a lifetime."  I notice her red lipstick is starting to creep into the lines of her upper lip.  She reaches for the last pot pie and sweeps it across the scanner. The machine beeps in an obedient reply.

"Something I’ll never forget.  I swore then, I’d never lie again.  So, I’m not gonna lie." She looks at the old man in earnest, "You asked me how I am.  I’m good.  But  I'm only good- ish.  A girl’s got to tell the truth.  So that’s all I got for you.  I’m good, but it’s gonna have an ISH on it today.”

The elderly man gathers his plastic sacks and waits for the bright red nails to rip the receipt churning with a mechanical cluck through tired fingers. 

She turns to me in a final catharsis, "You gotta be real, ya know.  Sometimes it’s all in the ISH.”