Grocery Run

“Get in, kids, we’re going shopping!”

Setsuna’s mom, Tsubomi, made fun out of everything. That didn’t mean she made everything fun. He scowled as he got into the car, with Nagahisa trailing behind him. Elegy took the passenger seat today, as she did most days, unless their mom insisted on switching things up. But riding shotgun made Elegy happy, and of course, she’d rather have one of her three kids match her mood than none of them.

Summer rain battered the car windows, obscuring Setsuna’s view of the dozen parked cars in the driveway of their apartment building. No one would want to go shopping in another city of Tokyo in this weather, but mom always dragged them off to buy cheese, Spam, and whatever else caught her eye. To Setsuna, one plate of food was as good as any other, and Nagahisa was too picky to like the fancy stuff their mom bought.

So, as usual, Elegy won when they went out like this.

“We know,” Setsuna told their mom with audible annoyance.

Tsubomi turned the keys and started the engine with a big grin on her face. The car’s windshield wipers wheezed as they went from side to side, removing some of the rain on the front window.

“Are we going to buy some sushi rice this time?” Nagahisa asked.

“Sure!” Tsubomi replied. “See, was that so hard? Ask and you shall receive!”

“Oh…” Setsuna paused. He wasn’t one for smiling, but he had an idea that made him, maybe, happy? “Can we get less apples this time?”

“Fuck no,” Elegy snapped.

Nagahisa shot a meaningful glance at Setsuna, then chipped in, “half of the last batch went bad.”

“Hmm!” Their mom was distracted, fiddling with her phone to get a route to the store she liked, but she was listening enough to respond. “Well, we can get one that’s half the size.”

“Seriously?” Elegy looked back over the head of her seat to glare at the other two.

“Welllll, if we cut things like that out, I can get some pretzels and a six-pack,” Tsubomi explained. “So, we’ll try that out! Update the shopping list!”

“...we don’t have a shopping list,” Setsuna mumbled.

“Oh, right! Well, enough distractions! Mom’s got to drive!”

And Tsubomi did drive. Poorly.

“Oh, no…” Tsubomi groaned.

The mother and her three children stood under the cover of a bus stop as the rain poured down. Their car had suffered a fender-bender – again – and they all watched as an irritable crew towed both of the cars involved. The stumbling salaryman driving a Toyota, who Tsubomi had hit, swore at them before running off. Setsuna pitied him: he probably had somewhere important to be, at the very least at home so his wife wouldn’t get mad.

His mom, though, never made any appointments she couldn’t keep. And she couldn’t keep most appointments because of stuff like this.

“Oh, come on!” Elegy threw her head to the sky and curled her fingers like claws. “Again!? Again, mom!?”

“Well, you know what I always say,” Tsubomi waved her hand in front of her nose, “alcohol and water don’t mix! He shouldn’t have been so drunk! And if he HAD to drink and drive, he could’ve gotten away with it by avoiding main intersections!”

“No one has to drink and drive,” Nagahisa muttered.

“Also, you can’t drink straight alcohol,” Setsuna added.

“Yeah, mom. Are you stupid?” Elegy concluded.

Their mom probably recognized that her children had united to pick on her, a rare but terrifying battle formation, and she resorted to her usual strategy. “Well! You know what would make me feel better right about now? Some McDonalds! Or anything else, really! Where should we go?”

“Another grocery store, obviously,” Nagahisa muttered, keeping his voice low as if accepting that someone would speak over him. “What kind of grocery run doesn’t have groceries?”

“A good one!” Elegy popped off, puffing out her chest and crossing her arms. “Honestly, this whole grocery thing was dumb anyways. We should go get McDonalds!”

“No, we should go somewhere that won’t be busy because of the rain,” Setsuna argued, a stoic frown on his face. “Everyone’ll be in McDonalds. But the zoo should be open still.”

“Oh, sure! You just wanna pet the animals!” Elegy argued, without making a particular point.

“...so do I, actually.” Nagahisa concurred.

Elegy harrumphed. “C’mon! Be a man! Petting animals is girl stuff!”

“If you want someone to be a man so badly, you do it.” Setsuna took off his coat, dripping with rain water, and marched towards Elegy, who took a step back. “Here, come on. You be the brother, Elegy.”

“Ew, no! Get away from me! Your coat isn’t even rainproof!”

The kids were getting taller, so Tsubomi had to reach up to plant her hands on their heads, one each. “Now, now! No arguing and no tormenting each other with cooties. I think the zoo is a great idea, even if they don’t let us pet the animals. After that, we can go to McDonalds! It’s been a while since I fed the birds.”

“You’re not supposed to feed the birds.” Nagahisa spoke as if reciting the text from a sign in front of him, and his mother, of course, ignored him.

“Wait, the zoo’s like ten miles away!” Elegy argued. It was more like one and a half, but exaggeration made her point better, and Elegy didn’t know that in any case. “How are we supposed to get there with no car?”

“Who said we have no car?” Tsubomi reached up and pointed a finger at the top of the Toyota dealership two blocks down, visible over a handful of shorter apartment buildings. “Well, we don’t, but we can always rent one, you know?”

“They’re not going to give you another rental car, mom,” Setsuna told her. “You totalled three this year.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that! I know a guy who knows a guy!” Tsubomi circled around to the back of the bus stop, behind the children, and began trying to push them out, using hands on a shoulder each for Setsuna and Nagahisa and the rest of her body to push against Elegy.

It was awkward and feeble, but the kids went along with it and back into the rain. They knew that struggling would just delay the inevitable.

What could they really do?

Every time Nagahisa got up and started pacing around, Elegy and Setsuna reluctantly pulled him back down onto his chair. They’d been waiting in the front room of the dealership for a while, but they’d seen enough of their mom’s so-called friend to know what was going on.

“He’s going to scam her,” Nagahisa muttered irritably as Elegy sat him back down.

“Of COURSE he’s going to scam her! We all know who he is!” Elegy could remember that pleasantly smiling face and that condescending voice instantly. He was in some of her earliest memories! And he was an asshole. They all knew that.

But he could also tell their mom what she wanted to hear, and that was a fast track to having her wrapped around your finger. None of the kids could think of any other way for her to get a rental car.

“Well, he probably won’t hold her to her debts,” Setsuna was still sitting down, with his arms crossed. “He’ll say, do this devil summoning work for me and I’ll reduce your debt by half.”

Nagahisa scowled and punched the wall. But not too hard, because that would be vandalism. “We’re just sitting here and letting Mammon of Greed exploit our mother…”

“Aaaand sold!” A man in a vibrant purple doublet threw open the door, with Tsubomi grinning like an idiot behind him. His masked face, depicting a pleasant smile, concealed what was no doubt a far more demonic smile of glee. “Bless your hearts, kids. You don’t hafta worry so much. Your mother won’t have any debt hanging over her head, see! In fact, she’s paying up front!”

Nagahisa perked up, Elegy sat up straight, and Setsuna’s frown grew at the edges.

The car Mammon had sold them was one of the smoothest rides the children had ever experienced. On paper, it was a silver 200X Toyota Opa – a name that made their mom cry laughing every time she mentioned it. In practice, however, all three siblings suspected that there was some kind of supernatural influence on it. When they launched over a speed bump, the car didn’t even buckle. When she hit the side of the highway, there was no grinding noise, just a gentle nudging back onto the lane. And even though it was still storming, the tires seemed to have perfect traction.

They were riding through the three-lane intersection near Gotanda Station like their mom wasn’t the one in the driver’s seat. They turned the corner near a tall white building with brown stucco windows, and the “AOYAMA” sign at its front never got perilously close to the car. In fact, they didn’t even hit the sidewalk once, and every other vehicle on the road kept a respectful distance!

“If this car is alive, they’re gonna be mad you keep calling them the ‘Toyota Oppai’,” Elegy said. Normally, she would be punching her siblings on the shoulder, fighting over game consoles, or whatever else she decided, but right now she was glued to the window, watching to see if they might go off the highway and start flying. That’d give the ordinary folks a good shock.

Their mom audibly gasped. “You can’t say that, Elegy! That’s a bad word! Besides, that’s the brand of the car. You know, like how we’re homo sapiens. The car’s name is Chris!”

Nagahisa blinked. “Chris… does that make the car a boy or a girl?”

The car buckled, and there was no speed bump below or behind them. A man in a freight truck next to them honked his horn, and their mom laughed like a kookaburra, letting her “wahahaha” trail off before turning to look at the kids, grinning.

“Offended, looks like!” she said. “Seriously, don’t make the car too mad. I don’t wanna lose the privilege of taking my eyes off the road!”

“It’s a demon,” Nagahisa hissed. “You shouldn’t be doing that anyways!”

“Well, anybody who gets run over by a haunted car probably had a bad atmosphere about them, right?”

“No! That’s not right! This is why we never talk about morality.”

Setsuna spoke up. “I thought that was because of Elegy!”

Elegy’s head snapped away from the window to look straight at Setsuna. “No, it’s because of you guys!”

Nagahisa wanted to scream, but instead he just let a groan die in his throat. His family was good at arguing about matters that, to him, were solved. Like, for example, whether or not it was okay for demons to kill the occasional person. He was pretty sure that his mom was joking when she said that it’d be fine for the car to run someone over on its own… but he wasn’t one hundred percent sure, and that bothered him. Not as much as his siblings did, though.

“So… where are we going?” Setsuna finally asked.

Elegy snorted, and Nagahisa breathed out. When she was too impatient and he was too demoralized to ask their mom something, they waited for Setsuna to draw the short straw of his own accord.

“Well, our first destination is the Shinagawa Prince Hotel!” Their mom’s response was uncharacteristically straightforward. Was she nervous about whatever Mammon had asked her, or just invested?

It had to be one or the other, because she kept talking. “That’s where we’ll meet our contact.”

“What, old Uncle Mammon was too good to give you the job himself?” Elegy asked.

“Oh, no, no. Actually, he wants to stay out of it, and that’s why! It’s a dispute between summoners, and demons really hate getting involved in those.”

Nagahisa cut in. “They don’t like being boxed in with one summoner or the other. They prefer not to have strong loyalties. Right?”

“Most of them do! And for those ones, you could call Mammon a patron saint or something!”

“Except for the part where he’s a demon.”

“Yeah!”

In theory, the drive from Gotanda Station to the Prince Hotel should have been a short one. They just had to follow Road Route 317 east through Sony Street. There were four lanes and little congestion, so it should have only taken them about five minutes to get to the hotel.

The problem, of course, was that only two of the lanes were for driving on. The other two, one on either side, provided easy parking. And because it was a major road, all kinds of interesting buildings were a glance away.

So the three siblings sat texting each other, placing bets on how long it would take their mom to get distracted, pull over, and drag them somewhere else. In total, they put 2,000 yen on the line. Whoever got closest without going over won.

Nagahisa bet 25, Elegy bet 30, and Setsuna, succumbing to optimism, bet 40. Nagahisa won cleanly, at 28 seconds.

The car stopped in front of a tall but largely nondescript building with eight floors, not that many by the standards of the shadowed street around them. There was a narrow walkway to one side and several narrower doors along its front. Its most noticeable feature, though, was a colourful green shutter adorned with cartoon art, the sort you’d see rolled down over a storefront after closing.

“Oh! Look, everyone! It’s a zoo!” their mom declared. She rolled down the window and pointed at the repeating decal on the shutter, which depicted a huddle of animals including a yellow bird, a brown dog, a blue rabbit, and even a pink dinosaur. The text next to the decal did indeed read “ZOO”. Before any of them could respond, their mom threw off her seatbelt.

“Wait! There’s no way that’s really a zoo,” Setsuna pointed out. “We’re in the middle of the street…”

“Plus, it’s ZOO in capital letters. That’s it. Not even like, ‘Sony Street Zoo.’ Seems like a trick to me.” Elegy agreed with Setsuna, quite possibly because she’d just lost a bet to Nagahisa.

Nagahisa groaned, but said nothing. Instead, he took the scuffed-up bills sitting near his seat, put them in his pocket, undid his seatbelt, and stepped out of the car.

Elegy swore quietly enough that their mother wouldn’t hear her, and Setsuna stomped his foot. The floodwater on the road was about half as tall as their shoes, and every step was like entering a new and particularly aggressive puddle. It hadn’t stopped raining either, of course. Why couldn’t their mom just keep herself in check until they had a nice parking garage to stop in, Elegy thought?

But their mom had already stopped in front of the narrow red door left of the shutter. “Hmm…” she made that noise especially loudly, as if to make sure the kids could hear it. “Looks like this doesn’t go to the zoo! But how do we get in?”

“We don’t, right now,” Nagahisa called back, running onto the sidewalk. “You know what a shutter is for, mom. The… zoo… is probably closed.”

Tsubomi whirled around and grabbed Nagahisa by the shoulders, eyes wide.

“That means the animals are stuck inside while it’s flooding! We have to help them, Nagahisa! Oh, maybe we can take them all home and look after them until the zookeepers get back!”

Nagahisa startled. Not because of how his mom had grabbed him, of course. This was a garden variety reaction for the most eccentric devil summoner in Tokyo. No, he was surprised that she almost sounded like she was making a good point. Almost. If the storm continued, the building could get water damaged, and then the animals… well, the animals were probably on elevated surfaces. Right? So they would be fine. But still, especially if some were in kennels on the floor, they…

And off mom went. She’d dashed off to the nearby alley, and Setsuna and Elegy were sloshing after her.

Nagahisa sighed. Well, he could entertain the moral argument at least. It made him feel a little better about whatever would come next.