Double Shift

They come and they go, some say hello. Most people only want beer and cigarettes. A muscly slug made his way to the counter and made a purchase.

“Old man, forty-five or so is giving me shit. That’s why I don’t put myself out there, you know? Gives me the creeps, dude hanging all around me and up on my wheels like that.”

He was unhappy, bought ten dollars gas and was on his way. This is where I go after the alarm sounds. Lecherous creatures here, they ooze from the mouth, ooze from the pores, too.

Forty dollars in quarters for twenty in gas, pack of gum paid for with a hundred dollar bill, it was another day of me first, you, never. We smile and nod, that’s what the timekeeper suggests. Hunchbacked and drooling with swollen feet, these creatures feed off of their own kind. We are all cannibals in this store.

“You’ll go to jail over a slice of Mrs. Market’s chocolate cake” Mike quipped as he locked himself in the manager’s closet.

You pay, but you didn’t pay.

Some of these creatures scratch papers and lose their lives away. Scratch, but don’t sniff or the attendant will know. They pay more and their hands collaborate in pursuit of failure. It is all a sickness, our cannibalism. One can smell the sickness oozing from cratered pores.

The trench-necked, sorrow man has tentacles. They were a deep brown, almost black, draped around his shoulders and almost to the floor. He has forgotten the rules of love, love has rules, surely.

“So, I definitely shouldn't do this?”

The paper he slid me had an address on it, his address. He crumpled the paper and left without the merchandise he’d bought. This was this day.

Last night was last night. There were thick patches of hair on my face, may have been a dream. They weren’t there when I woke. I woke up at the mop sink and a fear of craters kept me from touching my face. It’s like a disease, these craters, virulent.

The isles were a patchwork on the psyche. The mop left trails leading the wandering mind through the labyrinth of our labors. After hours of labor the whip cracks and I’m at it again, double shift. They become hallways of thought not hallways of merchandise. Elixirs of a hundred brands stock the coolers, for energy, sport, health and simple, slow death. Are we broken threads in this woven blanket of a garden?

“They tells me this and they tells me that, but the media don’t lie that’s for sure.”

He marched in, all eyes turn. His turn every time. Come, Narcissus and show us thyself reflected in the cooler doors. His craters are pus-filled with years.

“I’ve only been this great since I woke” he said as though all listened.

They listened, but for self preservation, not to humor the humorist.

“Just ring me for the one 4-pack. I’ll get you later on the rest.”

I just gave it to him. I didn’t need the confrontation. They say employee theft is the leading cause of loss in this industry, but I’m tired. Sleep might take me right here in front of the whole city.

It’s been twenty some odd years of sleep for me already. As I breath, only one theory ever came of those years of sleep, boxes in boxes, outside of boxes. Maybe there are leeches in the boxes. Leeches with swollen ankles crying about their hard times for a dime. Same leech came in two days later to buy cigarettes with those dimes. Her ankles were still swollen.

The craters of pus will tell it all in time. No lie stays hidden forever and the slow drain will one day reveal a hidden truth. Write one page at a time, then write another, progress.

I need a break, a day, maybe two. There are cities where buildings just go on and on, but nobody see’s them, obscured by something, I’m sure. I could go there and take notes for later or for the principle attendant, the manager of ceremonies, the time keeper. He keeps my time occupied with: don’t forget your change, debit or credit, would you like a lighter with that, can I interest you in a two pack special?

Write another page, but don’t spill the ink. It smears and the blotched up page forms images of more lecherous, tentacled creatures. Reptilian, mammalian or maybe it’s just ooze that my mind imagines into forms. For whatever reason, I see them, stuck in molasses.

In this room the floor is sticky. It took three and a half hours to get to the window. Just needed to sit a spell, but all the chairs here are made of thorns. Death by thorns, not martyrdom for I cannot save them, nor just death, for the dead buy from me daily and will not release me from this molasses coated room.

Boxes in boxes I say, outside of boxes, too. It’s too mixed up to try and explain plainly. Time stops for no one and soon the tentacled people will find themselves inside out and beer and cigarettes will be all that is left to save them from their peace.

One page written, another page drawn out and the story was scarcely a ribbon. The authors are strangers to themselves. Disinformation ties their intestines around their swollen ankles. Belief in the grayish slop fed by ogres with vendettas to produce and sell, produce and seed. Seed grows to new ribbons of a thickness.

Each man, woman and child pulls their own ribbon, often a scroll of hallways, humdrum, fanaticism and belief. Blob demons feed on ribbons of our era. Fear makes them do it; I’ve seen the fear in their twisted, gnarled fingers.

“One more thirty dollar scratch.”

He hit the ATM five times and ended the hour and thirteen with seven, eighty-eight in change, a single-dose package of sexual stimulant and a twelve-pack of his wife’s favorite watery domestic. A guilt-ridden blob demon if I ever saw one. For the wife, beer to get her drunk and for the blob demon, stimulant to keep the wife’s mind off the money.

I must have left the store and wandered a bit, found a quieter place and soothing darkness, a landscape to divide down my soul, but as I sat among the algae and bat guano the whining sounds of upset entered upon my person. I’d better order before the line agitates.

I ordered an algae, guano coffee, a latte. The girl had eyes like a lemur, as black as the sun after staring too long. A fistula in the center of her forehead oozed every gray matter of politeness. My stomach churned at the thoughts contained in the liquid now making a mess of the counter. Soul thin as a spring breeze, the universe only gives out so much. She was abused, but the lemur was strong.

“Espresso, please, in a larger cup if you don’t mind.”

The man had gills. He had been napping on the ocean floor trying to avoid his own shadow. He lived a backward life catching lobsters, eel and crustaceans to sell at the market. He grew flowers in their stead which drowned in the briny backwaters of his mind, but not to worry, the guano in his espresso should keep him happy for at least ten minutes while we make our escape.

The walls had scales like a dragon might and seats upholstered with snake skin. Masters of philosophy sat in each corner, bloated from so much water, professing to one another from across the room of worlds that would never be. I hear them speaking of gods and the light that is bright enough to blind. Ogling sloshes just entering might see flesh-covered androids tracing halos around their heads. Maybe these creatures wear hats, but I see halos of confusion.

Ten mirrors obscure the blinding beam of light that cascades from the chandelier in the center of the room. These mirrors are juxtaposed about the blackened walls of the coffee saloon directing the beam toward the corners and the swollen, dripping bags espousing there. Ten words spoken out of sequence are bartered for by the algae-lipped doomsayers. They know only how to drink their elixirs, not how to keep from spilling them.

At what cost do these creatures endure? What of it, just 25 million brain cells for a full minute of understanding? At that rate what was learned would be forgotten during the walk to the bar, a side effect. Only a sense that whatever had been said was worth it all would prevail. Back at the coffee bar one would receive the same puddle of wriggling, gray pleasantry which the lemur pored generously from the aperture between her eyes.

Finding time on paved alleyways and borrowing a bit more not found, I headed home, an old boss’ slime-laden words fluttered against my eyelids - splosh, slog, plop, splat; ‘Go nod off at home, okay?’ Yes, sir, post haste!

The streets were alive with all manner of species vying for the right to occupy their own square foot. Forests of alien fungi coated the cracks of the asphalt and the leeches slithered slimy organs which soaked up spare change and drained through the slits in the pavement.

“I seen tunnels under them stones. Some so deep and so dark, who knows, but I tell ya, they tunnels to the underworld. There’s big old stones you gotta lift to get on down to the lower levels. It’s creatures down there would eat yer brains or change yer brains if you aren’t careful. Might have changed yer brains already and you don’t know it, or mine, too. I hear ya bud, I hear ya.”

He spoke to himself as he crossed the street in front of me, one of the lost, crippled by lonely perspective. He had no arms and just walked about and made himself laugh. He’d seen things, no doubt and laughed at his own calamity.

A puzzle lay unfinished on the coffee table, some massive city with pieces missing. A monolithic eye sat upon a pillar and cast a shadow over the entire city. Dripping, slime entities with swollen ankles roamed the streets. All were blind. It might have had a purpose, but an obscuring ooze gave the shapes a liquid quality and they melted away. Someone had died to piece it together, died before finishing, this is how it felt, terminal.

I packed my suitcase for the mountains, filled it with toys and flowers. The radio broadcast news of the dying sun and the coming ice age and global temperature rise. Am I asleep or should I head for the station? Did I lock up the store or did we perform shift change? My apartment is well sealed, although I don’t remember locking up. Quietly, I sipped from my snifter and relaxed. Double shift must have ended, I am home. My head lolled forward, eyes twitching to the rhythms of sleep. I would have at least liked to have finished my drink.

I woke to a Florida summer day. Maybe I wasn’t actually awake, but I could swear I was. I remember packing only moments before. Sun soaked the room and I noticed I was dripping. Where had the night gone and what time was it? Ten twenty-two in the morning, my shift is at eleven. My plan was to cab it to the station and buy a ticket there, one way to Denver. Once there I’d catch a bus for Boulder and head into the mountains, write another page. I guess the next page will be more of the same. I never did make that train.