Abundance

The fluorescent lights hummed overhead as he pushed his cart through aisle seven. Pasta—a hundred different shapes, brands, colors. Who decided there needed to be rotini and fusilli? His mind churned. The overhead, the spoilage, the supply chains stretching across continents to fill these shelves with choices no one particularly needed.

Yet here he was, paralyzed between San Marzano tomatoes at $4.99 and the store brand at ninety-nine cents, as if the decision mattered. It didn’t.

At home, steam fogged his bathroom mirror. Hot water on demand—a miracle that required no prayer, no wells, no walking miles with clay pots balanced on heads. He’d seen those documentaries. The lottery of latitude and longitude that placed him here, in this abundance, instead of there, where children’s bellies swelled with hunger.

The guilt sat heavy as the water pressure, constant and reliable.

Later, lying in bed, he heard them through the window—the coyotes up in the hills. Their yips rose into something primal, hungry. Something had wandered too far from safety. The screaming started high and desperate, then grew ragged, then stopped.

In the silence that followed, he pulled his covers closer and wondered about the mathematics of mercy, about who gets to wake up tomorrow and who doesn’t, and whether the animals in those hills understood luck any better than he did.