We did not know Eirik Gumeny overly well; but we traffic in the art of words, and we wholly loved his way with them.
Eirik Gumeny was the editor of Atomic Carnival Books and author of Infernal Organs and the cult-favorite Exponential Apocalypse series. His short fiction has appeared in, among others, Impossible Worlds, Kaleidotrope, Soul Jar (Forest Avenue Press), and Escalators to Hell (From Beyond Press). His nonfiction has been published by Cracked, Wired, and and even The New York Times once.
Eirik’s story, “A Balanced Breakfast”, was selected for our Best New Weird Horror anthology this year. It is reprinted below in full.
A Balanced Breakfast
Eirik Gumeny
Perched on the edge of her secondhand chair, Dylan Shaw reached inside the family-sized cereal box, her hand diving, fingers searching for the toy inside. With any luck—yes! Tiny puffed waffles spilled onto the kitchen table as she removed her prize: a hard-plastic hyena figurine. But not just any hard-plastic hyena figure. It was Hayo, the cartoon mascot of Hayfeather’s Corn Cripsies.
The toy was small, even by cereal-box standards. Solid, alarmingly bright orange, the hyena’s spots reduced to etched diamonds. Non-articulated, like the army men and dinosaurs sold by the bag at dollar stores. The anthropomorphic animal stood on two legs, feet connected by more plastic, his naughty bits covered by baggy cargo pants. Something approximating a smile was carved faintly into the toy’s face, accompanying the outstretched and upturned thumb. The mane down the figure’s neck and back was little more than bumps, barely noticeable beneath Dylan’s fingertips; the tail was a deformed lump curling down from Hayo’s backside and into his knee.
Dylan continued to study the hyena, turning him this way and that in her hands. Almost a year ago, days before her twenty-fourth birthday, she’d received a double lung transplant and been promised a better life. But there she was, right back where she’d always been. Still struggling. With all of CF’s lesser-known maladies like sinus disease and digestive issues, an inability to keep on weight, a highly-specific kind of diabetes. With the immunosuppression and prescription side-effects that came from someone else’s lungs calling her chest home. And, of course, all the other non-medical bullshit that kept her broke and alone.
Exhaling through her nose, she stared at the tiny orange toy, holding it between two fingers. On any other Saturday, she’d have been more than a little disappointed by the paltriness and pitifulness of her prize. Maybe even annoyed enough to post a scathing takedown on her blog.
But today wasn’t any other Saturday.
Dylan made certain to wake up before ten that morning—not early, but earlier than she usually did. She’d gotten her medications and treatments out of the way, ate appropriately to keep her blood sugar from dipping suddenly and screwing her over. She hadn’t bothered to shower or change out of her penguin-covered pajamas, to cinch them tighter across her bony hips, pull them from beneath her bare feet. She’d barely even looked in the mirror long enough to free the few strands of pink hair tangled in her eyebrow piercing. The event needed to be precisely timed.
Without removing her eyes from the plastic hyena, Dylan tossed the cereal box to the floor, the cardboard quietly clattering alongside the dozens of other opened boxes. Crosshatched crispies mixed with bran flakes and oat clusters and the countless marshmallow shapes scattered across the cracked and peeling vinyl. A menagerie of duplicate cartoon mascots were jumbled in an unruly pile along the base of her kitchen cabinets. She only needed one of each, and Hayo was the rarest, the hardest to find.
“Finally,” Dylan said, her voice barely a whisper.
She’d studied the statistics, known Hayo had to be in one of the unopened boxes. The toy had to come straight from the cereal to start the ritual. She hadn’t counted on it taking this long, though. Seconds were ticking away. The window for all of this to work was closing.
Atop her round kitchen table—the sturdy, antique hardwood one she’d salvaged from a neighbor’s curb for precisely that Saturday morning—Dylan had already carved a wide circle concentric with the edge, a twelve-pointed star of exacting measurement inside. A tangle of lines connected the interior corners leaving a wide-open polygon in the center. Placed on each outer point of the star were the different Hayfeather hard-plastic mascots: Lukas the Lion; Greta the Gator; Eunice the Unicorn; Stella the Swamp Monster; Tomas and Tago, the twin tigers; Krystal the absolutely not a Godzilla knock-off Kaiju; Brock the Bear and Freddie the Frog and the trio of hip-hop prairie dogs that somehow managed to feel racist, even if she couldn’t explain how.
Slowly, carefully, like Indiana Jones disarming a trap, Dylan fought against the tremor in her hand and placed Hayo the Hyena—the thirteenth and final toy—dead center in the middle of the table. In the open center of the star. She turned him just so and quickly pulled her hand back.
The cheap figurines immediately began to glow, the molded plastic lit yellow and green and red and blue. Faint and spectral at first, but then brighter, brighter, brighter—until the figures began to melt. Their own strange heat unmaking the animals from the inside out. The trenches Dylan had dug with a steak knife and countless ruined spoons swallowed the toys’ molten colors, connecting them from point to point to point, until a rainbow flowed through the table, a raging river of multicolored and highly toxic joy.
Hayo, still standing safe in the center, was enveloped in a blinding white light. He began emanating an intense heat—it felt like the fury of a falling star expanding ever outwards. The wooden table began to darken, to pop, to sear and smoke. Dylan stood quickly, her chair toppling sideways with a clatter. She stumbled backwards, a few steps only, until she felt the refrigerator thrumming against her back, oddly shaped magnets pressing through her pajamas. She lifted her arm over her face, squinting into the light despite her better instincts. She could feel her pale skin beginning to rash, her cheeks, her exposed wrist, singing and stinging, a day-long sunburn in a matter of moments.
Dylan’s heart was a staccato pounding; fear and pain and adrenaline contracting her neck and shoulders, pulling her whole body tight. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting to happen, but it certainly wasn’t that. None of the grimoires and blogs she’d read had mentioned anything about a supernova being birthed in her kitchen. She began to reconsider everything that had led her to this moment. Began eyeing the door, to wonder just how bad it was going to be for her security deposit if she accidentally burned down the entire building—
—and then it happened.
A shadowy shape materialized in the cosmic light. Small at first, then growing, growing, growing. Dark and too-black behind the smoke of her burning kitchen table. Strange, yet familiar, too. An undulating silhouette that, despite looking entirely wrong, she knew was entirely right.
“Hayo,” she whispered.
Dylan couldn’t help but smile, to laugh even as her skin began to blister and bubble. Her heart threatened to explode through her chest. Her new lungs shuddered, not yet used to this feeling. Giddiness and excitement, the rush of unbridled anticipation, thrilled through her body without caveat. Every last vestige of fatigue and discomfort, every worry, replaced with uncut exhilaration. Unfettered delight, boundless energy, surged through her slight frame as it hadn’t since Dylan was a child.
Quite suddenly, the feeling stopped.
Instead of a cartoon, some cel-shaded cereal hype-man, in place of the Hayo the Hyena she’d known and loved for as long as she could remember—an abominable eldritch horror had appeared on Dylan Shaw’s kitchen table.
“What in the actual—” she mumbled.
The thing, the creature, the monster, was vaguely hyena-shaped, but with three heads and six mouths, and an excess of teeth in places one wouldn’t normally expect to find teeth. His fur wasn’t right. It was neither the orange of the Corn Crispies commercials nor the blond and brown of the real hyena, but a sparse and threadbare black—a coat of moldering shredded wheat. The splotches of skin beneath were mottled with craters and cavities and spots, obvious wounds and more generalized rot, all guttering with the green of decay, of death forever postponed. An animal broken but still breathing on the wrong side of the road.
The wretch stood on two massive legs, on gnarled talons carved from bone. He was hunched forward and breathing raggedly with great effort, as if choked and pulled downward by the weight of his own body. His rounded, segmented, caterpillar-like chest, his four thick arms and all the strange, vestigial appendages wriggling like tiny tentacles along his torso were too much. A great burden rather than his own anatomy. There was also no attempt at human clothing to mask the thing’s animality either. The table strained and cracked beneath his bulk.
“Huh,” Dylan said, her tongue wedged against her molar. She leaned back against the refrigerator and slid her hands through her hair. Her raw and blistered skin stung as she pulled back the shock of pink on the one side and brushed against the freshly shorn fuzz on the other. “This is…weird.”
She narrowed her eyes at the cosmic horror, trying to make sense of it all. Dylan had the vaguest suspicion that she was supposed to be having some kind of visceral reaction to the otherworldly monstrosity drooling all over her table and kitchen—the same clairvoyant urge that informed her this was Hayo even when he didn’t look like he should have. But, if she was being honest, all Dylan actually felt was a pit of disappointment in her stomach. And maybe the faintest whiff of confusion. The fear and excitement of moments earlier had resolved into exhaustion, her limited energy spiking and falling. She took in the beast with an almost clinical detachment, considering him the way she would any of her own maladies, cold and logical.
Dylan had done everything right, hadn’t she? Found the right toys, the right table. Carved the right symbols. Pulled them from the boxes at the right time, set them up in the right places. Waited, too, until the right Saturday morning. The perfect Saturday morning. An early autumn morning when the sky was bright and blue, the air crisp and cool, when every cartoon on television was new. And yet…
“You, mortal,” the primordial monster spoke from the center head, his voice an approaching earthquake. It rattled Dylan’s bones. She could hear her coffee mugs clinking. The beast pointed a long, clawed finger at her. His eyes were the sickly, sulfurous green of brimstone. “You are that one that has summoned me here,” he said. “You are the one—”
The creature’s massive shoulders drooped suddenly, the release of his own weight nearly toppling him from his precarious perch atop her increasingly more precarious kitchen table. He was practically bent at the waist. His threatening facade had wilted like a bowl of soggy bran flakes. All three sets of eyes darted around the room.
“…where, uh, where is here?” he asked.
“My apartment?” Dylan answered. “Or Washington Avenue, I guess, if you need a more precise location. Claremont, New Jersey? America? Earth? I’m not really sure what you’re—” She cleared her throat, ran her sweaty hands over her pajamas, and stepped forward with her hand outstretched.
“Hi,” Dylan said. “Maybe we should start at the beginning. My name’s Dylan Shaw and I run a blog, a breakfast blog, where we—I say ‘we,’ but it’s only just been me for a while now—where I review and talk about different kinds of cereals and stuff, and, uh—so I was thinking about starting a podcast, right? And I wanted to see if I could get Hayo the Hyena as my first guest. Which I’m guessing is you? Maybe? Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.” She shook her head. “I promise I’m better once we’re recording, much more professional. I’m just caught a little off guard right now and I am rambling. Nerves and naked hyena-monsters and all that.”
She paused. “Do you want me to get you pants or something? A towel?” She pointed toward the girthy, gangrenous phallus swinging between Hayo’s thighs, the half-dozen testicles hanging like swollen cantaloupes. “Because that is really distracting. And rude. And, honestly, kind of gross, no offense. They’re not really my thing on a good day, and that one is—”
“You,” the beast rumbled, hopping from the creaking table thundering the entirety of the apartment. “You tampered with the darkest of arts, with powers well beyond the ken of mortals—” All three of his tilted to three different angles, his brows knitting together. “—for a podcast?”
Dylan paused, trying to understand the other pause, the inflection of Hayo’s words.
“So, a podcast,” she started, sizing up the clearly ancient thing before her, remembering as much of Hayfeather’s history as she could and making some mildly ageist guesses, “is like, I guess, an old-timey radio show—”
“I know what a podcast is,” Hayo roared. “The knowledge of countless universes is mine to command. There is nothing known to the likes of you that I have not comprehended ten times over!” He bobbed his heads back and forth, softening slightly. “Plus, podcasts are pretty much all that we get to listen to back at Hayfeather headquarters. One of the guards, she has a Stitcher subscription and she is pretty loosey-goosey about using her headphones. Which is to say that I am well acquainted with the concept, Miss Shaw. I am merely surprised at the transcendental lengths you went for one.”
“Well, I don’t have a job anymore,” Dylan said. “And immunosuppressants aren’t exactly cheap. If I want my podcast to even have a chance, then, well, I have to do something to stand out, don’t I? And this—” Dylan smiled, finally realizing the enormity of what had happened. The excitement of discovery, of impending fame, superseding her calm demeanor. Adrenaline once again supplanting exhaustion. Visions of free foam mattresses and fancy socks danced through her head. “—this is going to make a killer first episode. The real Hayo the Hyena. Plus, I mean, it wasn’t that hard. Only took maybe five minutes? Two hours, tops, for all the carving. Honestly, the waiting was the hardest part. The ritual’s not that much of a secret, not in the cereal-obsessed circles I travel in. And I didn’t pay for, like, literally any of it. The kitchen table I found? Someone was just throwing it out. And I stole all the cereal, even before the FoodMart fired me.”
A sudden rage overtook the abomination. He growled through too many sets of teeth, guttural at first, and then high and higher, until it wasn’t a sound at all but the unearthly noise of a dying nebula. Dylan winced, as if someone had jabbed a spoon directly into her brain. She was seeing shapes in the air, a psychic disturbance that seemed to unstitch reality. It removed her, for a fleeting moment, from her apartment, from even her own blistering and star-burned body.
“Enough! Enough babbling!” the hyena’s middle head roared. “I care not for your hardships, the justifications you concoct for your sinister machinations!” Hayo rushed forward, a single stride across the small kitchen. He grabbed Dylan by the shoulders, pinning her against the refrigerator. A half-dozen magnets clattered to the floor. “You have upset the balance of breakfast, Miss Shaw. Removed a single stone and begun the collapse of everything! Do you know what will happen? Do you? Can you even fathom the depths of what you have done?”
“Is this a rhetorical question?” she started. “Or—because I’m guessing, what, that kids’ll end up moderately smaller? Or maybe even healthier? There is a lot of sugar in Hayfeather’s cereals, I don’t know if you know that.”
“This is no time for jest, Dylan Shaw!”
“I am being very serious here. I’m diabetic. Not Type 1 or 2, but this other kind. It’s cystic fibrosis-related, that’s the technical name. I can barely eat anything that Hayfeather puts out. Not the way I want to anyway. Definitely not the way all your commercials want me to, either, with all the fruit and juice. One serving of Supergreens, the ‘healthy’ option, with all the kale and shit, and that’s all the carbs I get for the day. I don’t care what Stella says.”
“What? Why are you—I am speaking of cataclysm. Of the end of all that you know, Miss Shaw. Of cascading consequences and city-ruining catastrophe well beyond the concerns of your faulty pancreas and dietary restrictions.” Hayo leaned in. His breath was rich with the rot of stars. “You need to take this matter seriously.”
“I mean, I’m trying,” Dylan replied. “I really am. But you try being chronically ill in a world that doesn’t care if you live or die. If I took things seriously, I’d never get off the couch.” She pointed a finger at herself, raw skin stinging, the pain already fading into the background. A tolerance built from a lifetime of hurt and harm and healthcare. “This, right here, what you’re regarding as callous smart-assery? It’s a survival skill.”
The otherworldly hyena-thing knotted one face with concern and shook the other two heads with disappointment and consternation.
“Without breakfast,” the middle head continued, “cereal manufacturers like Hayfeather will plummet into bankruptcy, destroying with them the foundations upon which your entire economy is built. Oat and wheat farmers will be forced into unemployment, leaving their fields to grow unchecked and unharvested until those same crops begin to overtake highways and cities, until your country’s ‘amber waves of grain’ are finally seen for the threat they truly are. The giant grain typewriters, meanwhile, responsible for Alpha-Bytes and Cheerios, will begin to rust and collapse, toppling and taking entire towns to their dusty graves—both financially and most likely literally, given the gargantuan size of the machines. Supermarkets will fire stockpersons and cashiers and baggers in endless waves as empty aisles begin to supplant full ones, product after product following in the wake of bran flakes and oat puffs. Only corn will remain, and only then the sugar of which you seem so afraid. Without cereal, without orange juice to siphon the surplus, high-fructose corn syrup with reign unchallenged. Soda and overly processed snack foods will become the only food, the only currency. And corn farmers, long the subject of protests and diatribes, will rule as vengeful gods. Dentists will rise as nobility in their shadow, growing fat from cavities and sitting on thrones built of lost teeth.
“Health and common sense will fall to the wayside as the very notion of breakfast becomes so ludicrous that many will cease to believe in its existence at all. Society will lose the very memory of the meal and pause at the uncertainty of the word. The entire brunch-industrial complex will likewise implode, flooding the streets with waiters and waitresses and other assorted waitstaff, stressed and angry with nowhere to direct that rage. Influencers will take pictures of nothing at all, will drive themselves to the brink of insanity and past it, refreshing and refreshing and refreshing, waiting for likes and comments that will never appear.
“As breakfast perishes, so too will other meals and deeply held digestive beliefs. People, swimming before waiting an hour, will drown by the score. Doctors, no longer held at bay by a simple apple, will swarm the streets, prescribing painkillers with wild abandon and increasing their rates to heretofore only theoretical numbers, driving millions of nurses and EMTs to the breaking point, homeopaths into the deepest of despairs, and funeral home owners into a higher tax bracket they are absolutely not prepared for. And all the while—”
The eldritch hyena stopped, tilting one head and furrowing two of its three brows.
“Why are you smiling?” Hayo asked. He released his grip on the Dylan and took a step backwards. “Why are you not shitting yourself in fear? Do humans no longer shit themselves in fear? You all used to love shitting yourselves in fear.”
Dylan stifled a gruff laugh, then leaned back against the refrigerator, crossing her arms over her chest. “Your guard doesn’t listen to the news much, does she?”
“Not really, no,” Hayo said. “Or at least at work she does not. Nichelle, she has a backlog of podcasts that she is meticulously working her way through. If it is not a five-year-old, true-crime story or something that a woman named Cardi B sings about, then I suppose I am, as you say, pretty out of the loop.”
“Do you want to know why the FoodMart fired me?” Dylan asked, arching a pierced eyebrow. “FoodMart’s a supermarket, by the way, in case—I guess it’s all there in the name—anyway. Because I dared to actually use my health insurance. It wasn’t, like, a good plan, by any metric, but it was the only reason I was even at the store in the first damn place. Once my claims started piling up, though, corporate—completely coincidentally, of course—forced my managers to move me to part-time so I didn’t qualify anymore. Which is about when I started stealing. And I mean goddamn everything. Most of my underwear comes from the FoodMart. Socks, T-shirts, utensils. I’ve got about a dozen whisks I never use. And two tents. They ordered a bunch of them for the summer cookout season for some reason.
“But fencing shitty silverware only gets a girl so far, so I started working more shifts anyway, putting in all the hours the FoodMart had taken from me. Trying to force my way back into full-time and all those garbage benefits I needed. Those bastards let me work all the way up to twenty-nine hours and then, right before the clocked ticked to the next one, sent me packing.
“The only reason I can live here, in this apartment?” Dylan spun her thin finger around, pointing vaguely at the ceiling. “Is because there was a double homicide. Twice. And not even podcast-level murders. None of the deaths were on the news, and the landlord certainly didn’t disclose it. I basically blackmailed her into giving me the place after my friend who lives down the street saw the ambulances and the cop cars. And, Jesus, every other part of the last two years, too. Trying to live post-transplant in a world that, en masse, has decided to give up believing in science? And I haven’t even gotten to the Nazis yet …”
“Nazis,” Hayo repeated emptily. “Nazis are back?”
“They are,” Dylan continued. “Probably not exactly like you’re thinking—I’m still not entirely sure how old you are, I know Hayfeather started in the fifties—but they still suck the same.” She smiled sideways. “All of which is to say Hayo, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to do a lot better than ‘the world’s gonna be a horrible shitshow’ to scare me.”
“Oh,” he said, “I can do better.”
All three of the hyena-thing’s heads grinned cruelly, teeth pushing to the outside of his faces, raised like rice puffs floating on chocolate milk. The two heads that weren’t speaking began to laugh, short and high-pitched.
“Hayfeather has kept me and mine,” Hayo said, “all of us, all the mascots you idolize, that you collect, chained up in a subbasement of their corporate headquarters. Locked us away beneath steel and cement, hidden us underground in some backwater nowhere, far from prying eyes. They have stolen our names, our images, have siphoned our unyielding cosmic energies in the name of merchandising. Corporate synergy. And you, Dylan Shaw, have the gall to wonder if we can do better? If the revenge we wreak will be anything short of utter annihilation? An unceasing apocalypse upon your entire reality?!
“You have freed us, Dylan Shaw,” he continued, “as much as you have doomed us. In the interim years between this moment and the forgetting of our kind forevermore, in the years your society slowly crumbles but we still yet draw power from the balance of breakfast, our final act of malice toward your world will be nothing less than abject violence. You will count yourself lucky to see the dystopia you have created. For in that decade of despair and discord, in the decade that you, Dylan Shaw, have already initiated—”
“Hold on, dude,” she said. “This is going to take years? Decades? C’mon. There’s not going to be so much as a post-apocalyptic shantytown, much less a society, left to destroy at that point. We’ll be lucky if we make it to Christmas.”
“You dare to make light of my trials? Of the misdeeds perpetrated against—”
“Yeah, okay, you’ve been screwed over by the rest of humanity, too. Fine. Do you mind if I grab my phone?” Dylan pointed toward the kitchen counter. “Maybe record all of this? Because what you’re saying is, quite frankly, podcasting gold. I mean, I’ve got an audience—Cereal Killers, my blog, gets tens of thousands of hits a month – but this is a story that everyone is going to want to hear. I’m talking NPR, maybe even some of the national news shows.” She smiled as she shook her head, dreaming past her lingering discomfort. “I am going to ask for so many Bombas…”
“You wish to exploit me even further?!” the eldritch hyena roared, following Dylan as she stepped to the counter. “Do you not understand the wrath I could unleash? The boundless and unspeakable tortures upon your entire species I could devise with nary a moment’s thought?”
“You keep saying that, but…”
“I come from a universe, young lady, that lived and died a thousand times over before your pitiful human existence was even a gleam in the eye of—” Hayo stopped, only then noticing the dozens of cereal boxes on the floor. He poked at the nearest one with a bone-talon. “Is that—is that a box of Corn Crispies?”
“And Frosted Frogs?” asked one of the other heads.
“I thought they stopped selling those,” said the third.
“It is,” Dylan said, her thumb swiping along her phone screen as she searched for the voice recorder app, “and it is, and they did. I stole literally an entire pallet from the stockroom on my way out. Had to get Billy to pick me up in his pick-up.” She looked up at the hyena-monster, sadness softening her. “Do you not get to eat your own cereal?”
“I…I do not,” Hayo said reluctantly, Dylan’s sorrow apparently contagious. “Nichelle has sneaked me a few small boxes of Corn Crispies on occasion, the little ones, the individual-serving ones that you can eat right from the box, but the rest of the cereals...”
“And here I thought corporate malfeasance couldn’t get any worse.”
He scoffed genially. “There is always worse.”
“Actually, on that note,” Dylan replied, “don’t bother with the Gator Flakes. I don’t want to disparage Greta or anything, I’m sure she’s great—”
“She’s actually kind of a lot,” said the third head.
“– but her cereal is hot, festering trash. Personally, I’d recommend the Unicorn Poofs. It’s a terrible name, and marketing it as magical horse farts is weird, but the marshmallows are really, really good. Ten out of ten, for sure. It’ll turn the milk pink and purple, too.”
“Huh,” Hayo said.
Dylan watched all three of the beast’s heads run through a whole host of conflicting emotions. The cosmic horror appeared to be contemplating the spilled cereal at his feet, the jagged flakes and rounded puffs, the raisins and dried blueberries and shards of strawberries, the litany of oat and corn cut into shapes, into letters and circus animals and shooting stars.
Only then did Dylan notice the small scars along Hayo’s arms, eerily similar to the souvenirs of IVs and PICC lines she had along her own. The telltale pockmarks of needles, too, hidden by his strange and half-rotted flesh. The dots and thin red lines and faint bruises indicating constant lab draws, endless bloodwork. The wrists rubbed raw from restraints. Malnourished ribs exposed beneath his misshapen chest and appendages.
She furrowed her brow, ignoring the pain of her pinching skin. Dylan hadn’t been expecting to see shades of her own past, her own trauma, in an other-dimensional hyena-monster. She hadn’t been expecting to be seized with compassion for an eldritch cereal mascot that had burned up her kitchen table, rattled her cupboards and all her meticulously ordered coffee mugs, and left gouges and weird footprints across the floor. She certainly hadn’t been expecting to discover and then voluntarily give up the single biggest scoop in the history of investigational breakfast reporting.
But, well, it had been a day.
“You want me to get you a bowl?” she asked, before holding out her phone. “Unless you’d rather get back to reliving your suffering and telling me in great detail about all the imprisonment and exploitation and the horrors inflicted upon you, all the unceasing vengeance you’re going to wreak in return?”
“Oh, right,” Hayo said. “The, uh…the…bad stuff. Hayfeather. Corporate evil…”
The hyena-thing looked from the cereal boxes to the young woman, and then to the boxes again. He chewed on one of his lips.
“Do you have any oat milk?” he asked. “I am lactose intolerant.”