Marie-Louise stared at the empty shelf in front of her in disbelief. She was shivering uncontrollably, feet trembling in her boots, socks soaked all the way through and heavy with the weight of the freezing rain that pounded down outside. She closed her eyes and reopened them carefully, as if a slow enough blink could make a box of Pop-Tarts suddenly appear on the shelf. This was, of course, a fruitless effort, and the empty space continued to taunt her as she stood in the aisle, motionless, trying and failing to come up with her next move.

In the months since her divorce, few things brought joy to Marie-Louise’s life anymore. She still enjoyed Wheel of Fortune every night at 7:00 PM, and she still enjoyed her favorite Beatles album (Rubber Soul, out of spite, because her ex-wife always overlooked it), and she still enjoyed chatting with the mechanics at the auto-repair shop while they inspected her Volkswagen for the fifth time in one week in hopes of figuring out what was wrong with it. They couldn’t, and she had to leave her beloved car there overnight, vehicle-less save for her old green bicycle.

More than any of those still-enjoyable things, Marie-Louise enjoyed a strawberry Pop-Tart. It tasted like childhood, she supposed, like hurried breakfast before elementary school, and like drunk college nights when snack options were limited to whatever was cheap and sugary. A strawberry pop-tart not only tasted good, or, well, good enough, but it felt so incredibly familiar in her hands. The crumbling rectangle was dry and chalky but soft enough to break up into little pieces, which was how Marie-Louise always ate it. Breaking off a piece with the correct crust-to-filling ratio was important, and she had been perfecting her technique for nearly two decades now. The Pop-Tart even looked good most of the time, the green and orange and pink sprinkles evenly spread on top of the white frosting, complementing each other. Occasionally one pastry would have a clump of sprinkles in one spot, ruining the aesthetic beauty, but Marie-Louise didn’t mind much as long as the rest of the Pop-Tart eating experience was up to par.

But there were no strawberry Pop-Tarts for consumption, not today. She had biked all the way to the grocery store in a moment of desperation, unaware of the fact that a rainstorm was due to start minutes after her departure, ultimately convincing herself that a quick ride through the rain would be worth it as long as she got her beloved toaster pastry. A foolish decision, and one that Marie-Louise hated herself for.

Marie-Louise backed up from the shelf, suddenly unable to get far enough away from it. Her step backwards was an unpleasant one, squelching, jolting her out of her introspective self-pity and back into reality, where she was drenched in dirty rainwater. She felt like crying, but she didn’t really want to cry in aisle eight of Jewel-Osco on a Tuesday night, and she definitely didn’t want to bike all the way home with tears in her eyes. She drew a shaky breath and turned away from the shelf where the Pop-Tarts should have been, choosing to surrender to the loss instead of trying to fight it.

Fourteen paces to reach the end of the aisle, where a heaping pile of pink and red Valentine’s Day candy sat stacked high, laughing at her. Marie-Louise used to tolerate Valentine’s Day, maybe even like it in the years when she still believed in love. Now the conversation hearts and Hallmark cards taunted her. She had to look away. Another twenty-six paces to the door, and nine more to reach her bike, leaned up against a lamppost. Even her beloved green beach cruiser looked pathetic at the present moment, so small, so wet, so sad. Marie-Louise reached for the handlebars, defeated, and looked up. The rain poured down on her, unrelenting, and she wished it would wash away her sorrow like it always seemed to in the movies. Mother Nature didn’t grant her wish, and Marie-Louise’s emotions swelled in her chest, cold and shaky and exhausting.