Ellen always comes to the supermarket after two a.m., when it’s quiet. She used to have terrible nightmares but late-night shopping keeps them away.

The supermarket stands in the middle of nowhere, fields on all sides. Somehow it thrives on that lonely road. All day the car-park is full, the aisles rammed with trolleys. Tired check-out staff find it hard to keep up.

At night, it is almost dead. Ellen is compelled to trawl the aisles, among the shelf-stackers and the other insomniacs. On her first nocturnal visit, Ellen was surprised to see what other people were buying – one woman had a trolley filled with nothing but cans of chopped tomatoes. Now Ellen makes her own strange purchases. The prices are so good that it seems wrong not to stock up. The only problem is consuming what she buys.

Ellen uses it all. She goes to work with a lunch-box she dare not open in public. She doesn’t want her colleagues to see the latest special offer that she's hoarding. Once she spent a week eating only sesame seeds. Another time she ate processed cheeses until she hated them, until she couldn’t get the red wax covering from under her fingernails.

This place can’t be natural. A few weeks ago, Ellen found some bread rolls in her cupboard, long past their sell-by date. They tasted no different to when she’d bought them. Why does nothing she buy here go off?

Ellen bought flour one night, eight kilos of it. Found herself home, five a.m., seeing if she could spoon it up and eat it raw. She choked, then poured the rest down the sink where it blocked her drains. The plumber was contemptuous as he fixed the pipes.

She used the shampoos eight or nine times a day, until fallen hair clogged the drain. She couldn’t bring herself to throw away the remaining bottles. Her hair was thinning from the chemicals. She lathered until blood mixed with soap scum at the plughole.

She notices others in the queue, buying their own nightmares: the man with a basket full of condoms; a young girl, barely an adult, her basket full of bleach; a woman has a trolley full of baby food and nappies.

She saw one man who always bought chocolate, basket heavy with more than anyone could eat in a month. His flesh was bloated, his clothes stretched. Whenever the nightmares return she finds herself dreaming of him gorging on chocolate, gagging as he forces it down. She wakes from those dreams and knows it’s time to go shopping again.

Background

Back in 2010, Maura McHugh and the late Christopher Fowler announced the Campaign for Real Fear, a competition to find stories that explored “horror in the 21st century”, looking for “diversity of characters and themes”.

Sure, we all love our werewolves and vampires, but where are the new monsters for our age? Where are the characters that reflect the diversity in our streets and neighbourhoods? What are the stories that tap into the terrors of modern life? We want to read them, in 500-word bites.

I submitted the above story, which was selected as one of the twenty winners. It was published in horror magazine Black Static. As I did throughout the 2010s, I responded to this encouragement by wandering off in the another direction.

I’d write this piece differently now, but I’m mostly happy with it. I still love horror fiction, and write it occasionally, but I have a few good long stories that have never found a home. But, somewhere in my house, there’s a copy of Black Static containing my story, and maybe I’ll hunt it out at the weekend.

Recommendations

Three podcast episodes:

• Buck 65 has done his first interview in 10 years and even if you’re not interested in hip-hop or baseball it’s an amazing listen. He talks about his doubts about returning, and how he didn’t want to take attention from people who deserved it more, as well as his secret projects. Lots to think about.

• Kate Shields was on episode 9 of the Painterly Podcast and gave a thoughtful and interesting overview of her artistic practise. The discussion also includes an entertaining tirade against marathon running.

• Ross Sutherland’s audio project Imaginary Advice has returned for its ‘third season’ with Hallucinations (Part 1). But I’ve not listened to this yet. I’m saving it for the weekend when I can listen to the whole thing in one go.