An Isolated Incident

A short story by Mary M. Isaacs.

  The door buzzer sounded three times, with a fourth buzz a little after the first three. He clicked on the timer he always carried and then hurried to the front door to look out the peephole. He saw the back of a man walking away from the door. As he watched, the man climbed into a delivery truck and then drove away. They never looked back at his door; he wished one of them would sometime, and maybe wave or acknowledge his existence some way or another.

    Looking down, he saw the familiar plastic bag on the front porch. I wonder what it is tonight? he thought. He used to play a guessing game about the contents, but that was getting a little old now. He continued to look at the bag as he waited for the timer to go off.

   When it did, he unlocked the door (Why do I bother locking it? he asked himself. Who’s going to come in?) opened it and picked up the bag. It felt heavier than usual. Probably pasta, he thought. Any meat portions were so small as to lessen the usual weight of the bag.

   After closing the front door, he carried the bag to the kitchen, opened it, and removed the contents. Yep, it was pasta all right; the container was unmistakable.

   He wiped the inside of the bag with a paper towel and then set it aside. He was responsible for cleaning it and all the containers and putting them back outside—empty--to be picked up at the next delivery. Empty, because he was required to eat everything he was given. Once, early on, he had sent back some food he didn’t like. It showed up as the next meal delivery, with nothing else added. He’d been annoyed and sent it back once more, untouched. Sure enough, it appeared again for the next meal. Being extremely hungry by then, he ate it. It was only borderline digestible by that time, but he had no choice...

The rest of ths story can be found in the collection, Lux Umbra Dei.