The Carrier

Abstract

552 Feminist Studies 46, no. 3. © 2020 by Heather Fowler Heather Fowler The Carrier The carrier, not yet a carrier, shopped in the rain. For this person, whether male, female, or neither in particular, it was just an everyday almond milk and tortilla chip run one evening as they worried about freeway traffic and wanted to get home—cold, tired, wet, irrational, and exhausted from a mind-numbing day at work. It had been raining for hours, so by the time they approached the entrance and saw through the grocery store’s picture window one lone cart, off to the side, inside, that might be drier than those out front, they walked toward it as if to seize, with no great hurry, an unexpected grace. They grabbed it. They did worry, before their hands met the cart handle, that it might have a wonky wheel, as did many abandoned carts, but they took the chance, and it didn’t. So, this was a lucky find. Except that this cart’s handle, unbeknownst to the almost-carrier, had been sneezed on moments before by a woman who’d suddenly felt too ill to shop and so had darted out. This carrier couldn’t possibly have known that the woman who’d held it before them had just been to the airport five days before, picking up her son from Canada, and had touched several public railings with her clean, vulnerable hands. They couldn’t possibly have known that the woman could hardly breathe, even as she drove toward the store that night, hungry though wet and clammy with fever. In actuality, the only thought the carrier had upon reaching that cart and grabbing its handle was that it, as a whole, was unfortunately Heather Fowler 553 no drier than the others brought in from the outer lot, so it must have been left at the front quite recently. The carrier’s fingers curled in a grip around the still-wet cart handle bedazzled with hundreds of liquid drops. By that point, they knew they weren’t going back outside for a similarly wet cart—but the respiratory droplets from the earlier shopper ’s sneeze were camouflaged perfectly, and the virus was now all over the carrier’s hands. There was no way the carrier could have predicted this circumstance of contagion. They weren’t at the airport, or in a public restroom, or near a highly infectious country far, far away. They were at the local grocery store. They had gone to the store and grabbed a cart to satisfy a moment’s snack urge. Then their nose itched, so they scratched it. It could not have been clear to anyone present whether that or the other things the carrier did over the next half hour actually caused an infection. The carrier brought a savory food sample of orange chicken to their lips near the bread aisle, for example, then licked their fingers to remove the sticky orange sauce; they rubbed their eyes in Aisle Two, scratched their nose again in Aisle Eight, and otherwise touched their face, as is standard for humans, nine additional times during the following twenty -eight minutes. They were walking with that cart around the aisles, picking up items and deciding against them, grabbing some to drop in the cart, leaving some with hands returning to the infected handle time and again before moving back to the shelves. The virus could live on those items for up to two days, it was said, though opinions varied. And then the carrier went home with their almond milk, chips, vegan cheese, pinto beans, organic lemonade, paper towels, bag of ice, frozen peas, and disease. The carrier made dinner! The carrier Netflixed and carried on; the carrier chilled with a bad movie and only themselves. The carrier went back to work the next day and touched all the door handles, elevator buttons, and shared counters. It was six days before accelerating panic would rock the nation. The carrier had heard of the newest near-SARS pandemic devastating China, then Korea, then Europe, but they thought: No way will it affect me here where I live in America, which is...