Can't Get Bones Professionally Bleached Around Here

20250418

Prompt from DailyPrompt.com

Now, I try not to judge customers on their purchases. Even grocery lists which look worrying almost always have perfectly innocent explanations. Very few people are, like, serial killers.
So there I am, brainstorming all the reasons someone would need five litres of concentrated bleach while a woman frantically piles 200ml bottles of concentrated bleach onto the checkout conveyor.
Gotta be a cleaning incident. Right? She’s dishevelled, got eye-bags you could hide a Chihuahua in, and every movement’s panicked. She’s probably in the middle of some ambitious home renovation project and something spilled, and she needs to clean it all up.
Or maybe she has a pet and it’s got diarrhoea? Like that guy I was getting really worried about and then it turned out the reason he was buying all those chemicals is him fostering a geriatric swamp dragon.
The trembling pyramid collapses, bottles swarming along the conveyor. She doesn’t seem to notice. Too busy muttering “It’s not enough, it’s not enough…”
I cobble together a bland Professional SmileTM and clear my throat. “Uh, per?”
She jumps. Head snapping up to gawp at me. Did she forget we don’t have self-checkout?
I wave to the bottles. “Are, um, are you aware this is concentrated bleach? Each of these is good for a litre of standard bleach solution.”
Silence. Her gaze flicks between the bottle and me. She seems frozen.
Finally she says “Yes.”
“Uh, ok.” I shore up my smile. “Just checking. Didn’t want you to, y’know, get home and…”
My mumbles stutter out as hers resume.
Maybe it was like the hall which rented out for a funeral and didn’t realise it was zombies attending until after. They needed a lot of bleach. They were buying a ton of other cleaning stuff as well, but, y’know, maybe she’s got all that already.
She’s done loading them on and is now staring at me, shifting erratically from foot to foot.
I start scanning. Twenty-five bottles of concentrated bleach. Good for twenty-five litres of standard cleaning bleach.
Which isn’t that much? Right? Could just be like those poor banshees who were trying to get stains out of their tablecloths. Glad I was able to point them to a proper red wine remover.
I’m halfway through the bottles. She’s moved to the other end of the conveyor and is piling them into a battered backpack. Oof, that’s going to be heavy. Is she walking home? Or… wherever she’s going with all this.
Should I ask?
Shit, I’m gonna have to ask.
I cough. “Um, per-”
“I don’t have a coupon.” She doesn’t look up.
“Oh. Er, ok. I was-”
“Right, right.” A loyalty card is shoved at me.
I scan it. That normally happens later but whatever.
“Excuse me, but what are you using this for? Maybe I can suggest a better product.”
She pauses and squints at me. “…Are there products to get glow-in-the-dark paint off a living skeleton?”
Ahhh.
I pat her shoulder. “Third self-care aisle. Follow me.”

Prompt was “Your main character desperately needs to buy a gallon of bleach.”
[When I started brainstorming reasons I came up with loads of fun ones, so I decided to switch it up and have an outside perspective mulling over the best examples.]