11:30pm
Like most nights I am alone under oppressively bright fluorescent light, keeping company with shelves of dusty junk food.
The clattering ring of a bell against metal sounds and in slinks a man. His loose layered clothing is marked by grime and thread-bare at the joints, his face a week or more since shaving. He stops at the counter but his odor spills over. He observes the cigarettes and CBD products behind me, then, looking over his shoulder at the door and windows, mumbles something about the price of a vape.
“Cheapest vape I got is nine ninety three,” I say.
With his long neck lowered the man hunts the darkness outside before returning me a few-second frozen-faced stare. Then he limps away into an aisle.
I keep one hand behind the counter and one eye on him. His he keeps on the door as he creeps down the middle aisle.
Then he comes up the other side, perusing.
He returns to me.
“Can I help you with something?” I ask.
His eyes narrowed, “I’m being followed,” he confesses to me.
“Oh?”
He looks outside.
“Across the country. I can’t get away from em. Three years. They always catch up to me.”
“Who?”
He looks into the night, back at me. “I used to think I knew. Now?” he shakes his head, shrugs, “Thirty six states I’ve been in.” He produces an old cellphone, leans on the counter, shows its screen to me, a photo of a woman in a suit is looking directly into the camera. “This is the one got my power turned off in Louisiana last month.”
He flips past pictures of street signs, a dog, stops at a bald man in overalls glaring out at me. “This one slipped up and used my name the day I met him.”
He pins me with a glare.
“Used your name?”
“I don’t tell nobody my name,” he states. He jabs a finger at the photo.
I listen as he brings up more pictures of people on this flip phone. The subjects are diverse in almost every way, but each is looking directly into the lens, aware, unhappy.
The man searches outside with a jerk. “Did somebody come in behind me?”
“No, just us.” I assure him, pointing at the bell. “It rings when it opens.”
He nods. “They come and interrupt these kinds of conversations. They try to—”
The bell clanks as a young couple enters, laughing. The man steps backward, watches them walk all the way to the refrigerated drinks at the rear of the store before he looks back at me. “See what I’m talking about?” Then he strides away, yanks on the bell-banging door and exits left into the darkness. When the door closes, the couple is coming up the aisle, chatting indiscernibly. Another bell as they exit, also left, into the darkness laughing.
