The night shift is the worst goddamned thing. Hand to God, Scout’s honor, whatever it takes. You know who gets the night shift? The guy with thirty thousand in student loans riding piggyback on his overqualified ass and whipping him to laboriously find a third job that he can’t afford to lose and so when they tell him, “Hey, you’re going to work the night shift with Cedric the Glue-Sniffer and the Phantom Manager, whose existence we divine only through his terse and cryptic Post-It notes,” he just has to smile and take it because they’d be only too happy to fire him, plenty more where he came from, it’s hot and cold running losers out there right now.
Fuck.
It’s not only that you’re fighting your circadian rhythms just to get up and stay awake. It’s not just that it wrecks your sleep schedule so you get cracktastic dreams during what little shuteye you manage to snag while the sun is shining in your eyes through the shitty broken Venetian blinds that you can’t pay to replace. It’s not just the complete desolation of what you laughably call your social life. It’s not even that night shift gets all the grodiest, scummiest, most retch-inducing cleaning jobs in the store. It’s even only partially the customers, most of the time. They’re either bleary-eyed dudes and dudettes picking up gas on the way home from whatever salaried office job kept them sitting on their ergonomic chair all hours of the night or else they’re just straight up drunks’n’druggies trying to buy a squeeze-bottle of wine for a double-handful of pennies. It’s not any of those, in aggregate or singly. It’s more than that.
There’s something wrong with the night shift.
Here, look, I’ll give you an example. A for-instance. Illustrate my half-assed, bathetic point. This was last year, before Cedric finally managed to get his ass fired (which honestly I had figured he had pictures of the district manager blowing three goats and a clown or something given that he had worked for years while literally huffing paint under the counter between every customer. And yet he still managed to get shitcanned somehow. That, my friends, is dedication, and I salute Cedric as a true craftsman of auto-catastrophe.)
So there I am, behind the counter. Cedric had killed his daily quota of brain cells and was passed out in the stall in the men’s room. The Phantom Manager had clocked in at some point when I wasn’t looking and was off doing whatever he actually did during his shift instead of, you know, working here. I was reading the note he left instructing me to clean the soda machine, the slushie machine, all the coffee urns, the hot dog cooker, the taquito cooker, the nacho machine, the sandwich station, and every single shelf in every refrigerator unit, &tc and so on. I’d be madder about the Phantom’s ridiculous lists of tasks except that he never seemed to actually care if any of the stuff actually got done so long as you left a note in return telling him you finished everything. Best was if you included a big checkmark on it (dude was deep into checkmarks).
Anyway, me, countertop, note, and jack-diddly-all else. Suddenly the bell rings. On the night shift, you get about two customers an hour, tops, unless it’s like the Fourth of July or something. I look up and my heart sinks. You learn to spot the difference between the weirdos and the absolute batshit looney-tunes where’s-the-cattle-prod-Ma nutjobs, and this guy was burying the effing needle on the freak-o-meter.
He was a little dude, maybe 4’10” tops. Brown suit. And I’m talking full three-piece, here, including shiny shoes and swear-to-God a freaking bowler hat. His tie was black, or at least that’s what I thought at first. Looked like it had one of those inlay patterns of shiny stuff or something. And he was hauling a suitcase, an old canvas deal with leather trim, half his size and apparently heavy as lead bricks, the way he was straining at it. His face was pale and kind of... pointy. Pointy in all directions. I mean, his nose stuck out about three inches; his chin wasn’t far behind; his earlobes were almost sharp on the ends, up and down; and his cheekbones looked like you could cut a ham with them. He’d have been elfin if it weren’t for that grin, which looked more like the one you see on the creepers in the porn shop, which yes I have also worked and hell no not on the night shift are you fucking kidding me?
The guy drags his stupid suitcase up to the counter and stares up at me. (For a second, I wondered if he was going to hop up on the case like a podium.) I was only feeling my usual mix of contempt and boredom until I met his gaze, after which I was abruptly wishing the gas station were in a worse part of town so I’d have a cage and some bulletproof glass between me and whatever tight-coiled pressurized insanity was living behind those beady little rat eyes.
“You sell?” he says. His voice sounded like someone was using human speech like Peter Frampton’s talk-box guitar, wah-wahing it back and forth until it sort of hit the right sounds, but not quite.
Now, this dude might have looked like he had rabid weasels where his brain should be, but me, I’ve got a central core of pure smartassium, and I was so freaked out that I didn’t have even my usual limited self-control. I think that’s what saved my life. I get the cold sweats sometimes wondering what would have happened if I’d just said yes, what do you want, sir? like the good little drone I’d claimed to be on my application.
“Naw, dude,” I said instead, totally on autopilot, “I’m just hanging out in this store with an ugly shirt and a name badge because I like the ambiance.”
“No,” he snaps, and I don’t realize I’ve stepped backwards until I hit the cigarette case with my ramen-enhanced buttocks. “You want sell to me? I buy.” He heaves and slams his suitcase up onto the counter, where it makes the cheap plastic-coated particle board groan. I wouldn’t have thought he could even get it off the ground, but he didn’t even grunt when he lifted it.
That’s not why I jump, though. It’s the suitcase. The thing itself. Not anything about it; it still looks basically normal. But it makes my skin try to wriggle off the back of my body and crawl away. I don’t want to touch it. I don’t even want to go near it, but I can’t back away any further unless I learn how to merge with the Newport 100s. It appears to be a plain canvas case, but when I think about approaching it, about reaching past it to the counter and risking brushing my knuckles against it, I feel like I’ve imagined licking up a vomit puddle. Or maybe closing my fist around a handful of razor blades.
The guy waits for a second, I guess for me to respond, and in the quiet I hear a buzzing noise, like someone’s cell phone going off on vibrate. Except it’s a lot of cell phones. After a second, I realize it’s coming from the suitcase. Auto-pilot kicks in again and engages the Sarcastron 2000. I’m a martyr to my impulses, I swear. Really, I’m the victim here.
“Your vibrator’s going off,” I say. “What are you, the door-to-door dildo salesman?”
“I come to your home, yes. I make bargain, yes.”
“Dude, this isn’t my home. It’s a store. I sell things to you. You want a lotto ticket or some gas for your-“ I stop there because I’d just looked out the window. No car. No bike. No nothing. The only thing near the gas station is the highway and an all-night diner. “I don’t have any money anyway,” I finish lamely.
“Money, pfaugh.” He spits on the floor. Actually spits, on the actual dog-mad floor. It’s muddy black, like’s he’s got a cheekful of chaw. “I give better than money buys, and what I take you will not miss. This I promise.” He smiles up at me like he just invited me up to his room to see his etchings, and my gorge rises.
“Uh, what?” Okay, so the Sarcastron blue-screened. I’m not infallible. I’m the first to admit that.
“Your debt hangs on you like a stone.” His voice gets deeper, and he seems to be getting a lot better at English. That voice still isn’t right, though. It’s got echoes that it shouldn’t have. “I will set you free. Your mind finds no fit provender. I will entertain you. Your loneliness wraps you in a shroud. I will make you friends.” He pushes the suitcase forward. The buzzing gets louder. “Tell me you agree.”
It was hard to think. “Agree... to what?”
“Bargain. Bargain is always the same.” He leans forward, practically climbing up into the cash-wrap with me. I can’t take much credit. I’m just ornery and contrary. I don’t like to be pushed. Instinctive reaction. Can’t be helped. C.f. martyr, impulses. If he’d tried a softer sell...
“Fuck off,” I manage to croak. “And get your sex toys off my counter.”
Those dark little eyes flash, and I suddenly can’t talk around the lump in my throat. I see movement out of the corner of my eye and glance down. There’s a fly on the suitcase, a great big blue-black bottle fly. Not just one, either. Five, six, ten, a dozen. More all the time. I realize they’re coming out of the hole where the zippers meet, boiling out of it like lumpy black water from a faucet. Buzzing fills the air, so loud I can feel it vibrating in my back teeth.
“Last chance,” the freak says. My eyes shoot back to him and I realize his tie wasn’t black, wasn’t a tie at all. The flies are taking off, more of them shooting out of his sleeves, out of his pant cuffs, out of his goddamned mouth when he talks. He’s losing coherence. His voice is the humming of a thousand wings. “Sell to me. Sell to me now. I buy. Good price, always good price.”
The lump in my throat starts to tremble, and it’s not just fear clenching my muscles. There’s something inside of me, something that horrible little man is calling to, is pulling up out of me. Tickling in my throat. It’s a fly, like the others, like all of the others. If I let it go, he’ll take it away, put it in his suitcase and walk on down the road. I get that I won’t miss it, because once it’s gone I won’t care anymore. That, I think, is the payment, too. No golden fiddle for me. For whatever would be left of me. There’s movement in my mouth. I feel the wings tickling the back of my throat, the little legs starting to crawl up my tongue. I try to shake my head no, but I can’t move. It’s all I can do to keep my teeth clenched tight, breath frantically through my nose, sucking in flies that bump and ricochet from my nostrils with every inhalation, keep my fly inside, keep it away from the swarm.
The little man’s face is fading, pale skin shrinking away, leaving only those big black eyes. They’re growing, bulging out, turning faceted. I see my face reflected in them a dozen times each. I can’t breathe anymore; my nose is blocked with scrabbling chitinous bodies. They smell like dirt and ashes, burned things and dead bodies. I’m running out of oxygen. I’ll have to open my mouth to breathe in, and he’ll take my fly away with him. It wants to go; I can feel it bumping against my teeth from the inside. No. No, no, no... I start to see spots, see my vision tunneling in from the edges.
And that’s when Cedric, beautiful unshaven Cedric, glorious lord of the aerosol can, busts out of the bathroom door with his pants around his ankles and his withered old penis flopping around. He’s screaming at the top of his lungs and waving his hands. “I crapped my pants,” he shrieks. Then his ankles tangle up in his smeared underwear and he goes down with a crash, taking the snack cakes shelf with him in a tremendous crash.
I find myself able to move again. The store is quiet except for Cedric’s moaning. When I turn my head back, the little man and his suitcase are gone. Nothing but a couple of slow old houseflies bumbling against the plate-glass windows. Cedric’s moaning and mumbling to himself on the floor, and he sure smells like he messed himself. I swallow; no motion, no twitching lump. My fly is quiet again, back in whatever metaphysical innards it usually hides in.
The store is empty.
And of course I was the one who had to scrub Cedric’s stains off the floor and wipe down the snack cakes – you’d better believe I put ‘em back on the shelf; that shit comes out of my pay if I have to trash it. I even did a couple of the Phantom’s cleaning assignments. Had kind of a lot of nervous energy to work off, you know? I’ve never seen the little man and his buzzing suitcase again. I kind of wonder sometimes. When you make a deal with the devil, you’re supposed to get something real nice out of it, aren’t you? Money, power, fame. Meantime I’m sitting here eating Top Ramen and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese every night, working the worst shift in the worst job in the world and having to feel grateful to get even that, and all the while my loan debt plays the boulder to my Sisyphus, and I think to myself, How badly do I need that thing inside me, really? What has it ever done for me? Maybe it’s not so bad in that suitcase.
At least I’d have lots of friends.
Submitted September 03, 2015 at 09:34AM by Scattercat http://ift.tt/1JA6kCt nosleep
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