Candy Bar

Satan yawned and Beezlebub stretched lazily. Vlad the Impaler nervously laughed to break the silence, and all of medieval Europe’s executioners looked at each other in apathetic confusion. With enough time and enough damned, unfortunate souls, all the great torturers of the world had grown bored, all possible avenues of terror had been traversed, and every liter of anguish had been juiced from humanity.

That’s where my job came from.

Or at least that’s what I thought as I settled into my one luxury, a wobbly stool, and looked out onto the moonlit highway on which the Bison Convenience Store was the only occupant for miles. Why our lonesome gas station, that maybe got a few dozen customers on a good day, had a night shift, I couldn’t say, beyond maybe the aforementioned torture theory. It was a good theory too, I thought, as my eyes strained against every ounce of human evolution to stay open to catch an impossible customer, who I knew would never arrive.

It was maybe once every few hours that I saw the shadows of the surrounding prairie grass shift as headlights slowly approached, and I’d feel my veins begin to throb as the blood pumped in anticipation at the idea that maybe someone would stop and give me an inkling of human interaction, if only to read out a number and wish whatever weary traveler was unfortunate enough to be this far from home this late at night a safe journey. Every time though, the shadows stretched to their limit, the car jolted into view for a few seconds, before submerging me back into the icy waters of isolation with its unceremonious passing into the night.

There were no customers during the Bison Convenience Store’s night shift.

Then the bell above the door rang.

My nose was stuffed into my own consciousness like it were some sort of book, keeping me from shaking in anticipation as this unheard of stranger approached the door, with only its opening alerting me to his unusual presence. Looking up, however, I was even more surprised to find my eyes meeting his, as opposed to catching a fleeting glance of his shoulder or something as he vanished behind a shelf.

His skin made me squint as he swam across the floor, his hands neatly tucked behind his back as he made his smiling way towards me. Only as he got closer could I properly see the surface of his long black coat, previously obscured by the shine of his almost luminously pale complexion, but I didn’t get a chance to look long before his voice, perfectly midwestern in its artificiality and geniality, forced me out of my daze.

“Excuse me miss,” He chirped, as if I wasn’t already staring right at him, as if he had to get my attention like a sheepish child might, “I hate to bother you, but where are the sodas?” The word sodas dragged, every letter stretched out for at least two seconds, as he fluttered his eyelids, forcing me to blink as well in reaction to those strobe lights flashing on this stranger’s face.

I glanced up, I was right, our sodas were labeled on the wall.

“Our sodas are labeled on the wall,” I nodded in the right direction, towards the refrigerator which sat under a massive ‘Soda’ sign, nodding again for good measure when he didn’t immediately float off in that direction.

He fluttered his eyelids again, his already egregiously giant grin tugging at the corners of his impossibly thin mouth a little bit further, before he lazily turned in the same way a square dancer might while in the midst of a slow dance. He waited a few seconds, as if he had to plug in the directions to some GPS, before moseying off to find the sodas I had already given him clear directions to.

Relaxing tension I didn’t even notice had not only built up, but had left me with an aching cramp in my shoulder, I lamented drugs, then mental health issues, and then a sick convergence of the two that was the most likely explanation for this stranger’s inhuman behavior.

I delicately, nervously, watched the stranger as his form floated behind a shelf, disintegrating at the line where the shelf blocked my view of him. The tail on his coat seemed to flutter in my field of view, waving to me before catching up to the stranger and whipping out of sight. Even with him vanishing from view, the pit rooted deep in my stomach didn’t rise, instead only becoming heavier as the minutes wore on.

Every instance he wasn’t in my line of sight was an instance of things I couldn’t guess. I didn’t know the bounds of that semi-circle smile, nor the unheard of man on which it sat. And even if I knew the bounds of this store, and the world in which it resided, the way this unexpected visitor expanded those bounds seemed to fling me into an unknown sea, of which he was a seasoned explorer and I was a floundering castaway.

My fear mongering about the stranger was entirely turned on its head, however, when I turned my own to witness his sudden reappearance before me. In that singular moment I realized all assistance to him had been a farce, all interaction a meaningless formality, as he dropped a single Milky Way bar onto the counter before me. No soda, not even a drink, only a completely unrelated candy bar and his reflection magnifying off of its tin foil wrapper like headlights might magnify off a car’s rear-view mirror.

Grabbing the chocolate firmly, as if it were the stranger’s neck and I was ready to throw him out, I twisted it around to scan it, and in my attempt to focus on anything other than the disco-ball bald head on the edge of my vision, I narrowed in on a quirk of the candy wrapping. A slight tear along the ‘fin’ of the wrapper, as if some sneaky teenagers had tried opening the bar to pop in their mouths without paying.

“One dollar man, and seventy-nine cents,” I said, refusing to look up as I slid the bar back across the counter. I waited in anticipation for a blisteringly pale hand to push the money across, and the money did silently slide towards me, but no hand ever came into view. I didn’t look up to see the cause of this discrepancy, refusing to even see an explanation as simple as him wearing gloves, let alone the horrifying possibility that his hands were buried deep in his pockets. I simply took the money, all change, and flung it into the bottom compartment of the register. Three dusty pennies sat in the back of that ejecting alcove for spare change, joined only by a potluck of every coin I could accept scattering across the barren metal.

The question of a receipt was met only by the wave of a hand as if it were his head shaking no, the paper flapping awkwardly in the AC generated winds as I held it out, my arm half outstretched in anticipation for him to accept. To what would normally be my relief, but tonight to my worried confusion, he seemed to not even register the premature movement of my arm, his eyes never leaving mine even as my arm made its way toward him. Instead, he only turned away from me with the simultaneous rigidness and fluidity of an owl turning its neck completely around, and made his way to the door in three or four impossible steps, before bringing forth a now dreaded jingle and stepping out into the night.

The darkness consumed his black attire almost immediately, leaving a bobbing ball of pale light to bounce off into the distance, seemingly in the direction of the highway. I watched, and no car ever left the parking lot either. While the prospect of him being just around the bend, potentially waiting for a car to drive by, terrified me, I wasn’t about to risk an even more terrifying prospect: encountering the stranger in the dark. I was content to let him wander the highway on foot, so long as that trek took him far away from the Bison Convenience Store, and I let my head collapse back in on itself, back into disassociation.

Then the door opened, and a jarring jingle blared through the empty shelves I found myself alone amongst.

It only took the sound of three heavy footfalls before I felt the stranger’s shadow fall over me again. His smile hadn’t changed one bit, nor had his inhuman complexion, and least of all his unsettling presence.

“Forgetting something, man?”

“Excuse me miss,” I had seen that uncharacteristically lighthearted blink before, “I hate to bother you, but where are the sodas?”

I didn’t say a word. I couldn’t say a word. My mouth fell agape, my tongue hanging uselessly amongst my rows of teeth like a hunk of limp rope, and he met my shocked stare with the same perfect smile, and suspiciously inconspicuous, unbothered look in his eyes. We held that connection for a moment, his eyes piercing mine and more with that nonchalantly knowing gaze, as if he assumed whatever secrets lay behind his lazy eyes were common knowledge.

I wanted him out, and I wanted him out now. Whatever brings a stranger here once at this hour is his own business that I want nothing to do with, but whatever makes him come here twice is something bigger than either of us that I can’t afford to have anything to do with.

Slowly, and as if I were trying to be as small as possible, as if I were trying to hide in plain sight, my finger silently slid up into the air, pointing in the directions of the soda. The stranger listened to my non-existent speech, nodding as if my directions were vocal, before slowly turning like he had before, and drifting off, out of sight but only further drilling his way into my mind.

I watched the spot he’d appear from, the exact same spot he had jumped out from last time. I held my breath as the stranger tied my neurons in knots from a distance, waiting for myself to break down nearly as much as I was waiting for him. My field of vision began to expand then, my faltering eyes becoming so expertised in scanning this single aisle that it became the epicenter of a new map of the area, slowly expanding outwards.

Reality was only brought back to me as a harbinger of horror as I snapped into focus to witness a shrouded, black shoulder slipping slowly into view, followed by a bald bowling ball of a head that was completely antithetical to the body it rested on. The stranger’s body seemed to twist and sway like a fish’s might underwater as he approached the counter in complete silence. At this point, I didn’t even need to look and see what he had brought to me.

No soda, not even a drink, only a single, unrelated Milky Way chocolate bar.

I tentatively, delicately, placed my fingers on the candy bar, terrified to turn it over. However, already cursed with certainty over what I’d find, I realized my fear was futile. So I turned it over.

A slight tear along the fin of the wrapper, as if some sneaky teenagers had tried opening it.

The shaking of my sweaty hands caused me to miss the barcode with my scanner at least twice. Not like I needed to know the cost of the candy bar anyways.

“One dollar seventy nine, please,” I said, glancing down further than before, lowering my head almost completely to look at my shoes while I waited for the glint of coins, trying to escape even a glimpse of their impossible movement. All at once, just as before, they slid into view, pushed in the same way an arcade machine might across the luminously laminated counter. Not a single coin was out of place, not a single coin was different from the ones he had given me before, that I was sure of. Just to be sure, as I prepared to open the drawer, I made a note of the specific coins the stranger had given me so I could compare them to the ones resting in the register.

I’d never get the chance to compare. Still, I’m sure they were identical.

A click, then a ring, then a rapid ticking as the drawer fired open, throwing itself out like a punch, and while it missed my stomach by a good few feet, the air was forced from my lungs as the force of a boxer’s right hook hit me as I stared upon the register’s contents, or lack thereof. It was completely empty. None of the coins I had just placed in there remained, nor the three pennies who had long called that drawer home. Not even dust remained in the factory new drawer, whose pristine surface almost reflected my horrified expression back at me.

I silently said farewell to the coins, and placed them in the newly anomalous cash register. Quickly preventing myself from making the same mistake as before as the buzzing of the ejecting receipt tore me away from whatever newfound oddity resided in the cash register. I strained against muscle memory, against instinct, against time itself in a way to not repeat my embarrassing extension of my arm out to the stranger.

My correction was only met with a knowing nod, slow and steady, almost missable as a nod, instead easily being looked over as simply the slow bobbing of an impatient man. However I’d begun to know this stranger. He had all the time in the world. If he wanted to nod to me, he’d nod.

I got ready to count this time as the stranger turned. I wouldn’t miss his inhuman strides, wouldn’t be left dumbfounded by the diabolical contortions of his muscles, wouldn’t remain confounded as to what he must look like beneath the coat, beneath that glowing skin, to make such remarkable steps.

It took three, and I still couldn’t see how he did them.

History often repeats. It happens first as a tragedy, as nothing but tragedy could bring such a stranger at such an hour to such a place. Next it happens as a farce, as nothing but a farce could be so generically played out while being so impossible. Marx never said what happens when history repeats a third time.

My guess was horror.

The bell rang, the cool air wafted in, the door closed on its seemingly pressurized frame, and I failed to take in any of it as I squinted at the sight of the stranger’s unnatural brightness. He approached for a third time, and I still couldn’t bear to look at him with my eyes fully open. Maybe that’s why I missed it as I prepared to go through the motions again, as the words sat on my lips with impatient pressure.

The stranger never spoke, never said his line, just looked at me expectantly. Eyes locked on mine as he waited, slightly pursing his still smiling lips as if to rush me along, as if I couldn’t see this sign of dissatisfaction. It wasn’t until something new entered the loop that I finally looked down: the rapping of his fingernails against the counter. That simple movement directed my eyes like a conductor might direct an orchestra. I bowed down on the C string, and saw it.

No soda, not even a drink, only a single, unrelated…

I wasn’t sure if I should touch it, if I should depart from the script any further, but those drill-bit eyes demanded a performance, demanded some acting, demanded some pizzazz. I couldn’t help but oblige as I grabbed the Milky Way bar firmly, only for my single prop to give in.

My fingers sank, warmth surrounded them, and I raised my rapidly numbing hand to witness the magnitude of this improvisation.

“Hey-”

The chocolate dripped down my fingers.

“You can’t open it-”

I stared through the gaps in those makeshift, fleshy window blinds.

“There’s no returns.”

There was no man standing before me.

The completely wrapperless candy bar seemed to imitate my crumbling psyche as it melted under the heat of the lights above, its chocolatey surface shedding away to swirl and pool on the counter. I would’ve joined it in my confusion, in my desire to simply fall to my knees and sleep to forget this night.

Then the bell rang, and his smile was gone.

The stranger entered for a fourth time, his coat billowing up like a cape, and he strangled me with his scowl. He took a stride so magnificent that it could’ve explained how he vanished without a sound mere seconds before, his intentions clear from the pang of panic he brought forth in my stomach. Another step and I scampered back, struggling to stay on my own two feet as I abandoned my only companion, the candy bar, to turn and run for the only place I could. I heard another footfall and I was already narrowing in on the staff lounge, but another step from the stranger and he might just appear in front of me.

Thankfully, he never appeared as an obstacle, never grabbed my shoulder or somehow stopped me from escaping his quickly approaching ire. I slammed the door, I locked it. No banging, no scratching. Just me, and my labored breaths that told the world I just ran a marathon.

I hadn’t just run a marathon, however, I had escaped a thing of a man, an entity of unsatisfiable designs and a Mariana’s Trench of malice, and it was all on camera.

I wasn’t interested in selling it or proving it, I just wanted to believe it. I wanted to believe I wasn’t holding back tears on a razor’s edge, wasn’t holding myself up on twig stilts, wasn’t holding my unraveling mind together with dollar store twine, for no reason at all. I wanted to see that it was real, and I brushed my hand across the staticy CCTV screen to make sure the screen was too.

No more tricks, no more loops, no more blinding flesh or Milky Way bars. There was only the rewind button on the camera feed, and the wait that laid ahead of me to watch the nothingness of the store up until the stranger first entered.

I watched, waiting for his grand entrance.

I watched, waiting for the first loop.

I watched, and refused to look at the clock.

I watched until tears rolled down my cheeks, until I couldn’t stop my arms from slamming down on the table, until there was no force on Earth that could stop the scream from escaping my throat.

No stranger ever appeared on the screen, not even an anomalous interruption in the camera feed. There was only me, standing there for hours, waiting like I always did for customers who never came. At one point, I lazily turned, almost comically contrasting my contortions, my cacophony of confusion, and crazed, scattered thoughts as I watched the mundane scene play out. On the camera feed, I simply walked away, presumably to the staff lounge, and that was that.

Everything was normal, except for one oddity, one feature of the footage that was there from the start. When it was clear I would see no footage of my frightful encounter, I clumsily reeled back the feed further to before the sun had even set, before I even clocked in, and it was still there. I looked back further in the day, searching for a moment when the anomaly wasn’t resting in plain sight, let alone searching for the person who placed it there.

I hit the end of that day’s footage archive before I found anything resembling an answer for why that object was sitting there, conveniently missed by every worker, every customer, every singular human being who passed by its transient, liquefying form. For at least a whole twenty-four hours it had been sitting, undisturbed, unnoticed, and after all this time, it finally meant something.

A single, unrelated…

There was no time anymore, I refused to acknowledge it, so I can’t say if it was my screaming, my sobbing, or just the ever continuing march of the sun that brought forth the jingling of a key ring, and the door swinging open. I braced myself for the worst, I berated myself for missing the stranger’s entrance, I bemoaned myself for not preparing better for his inevitable return.

Then my boss spoke, his tone unfindable, buried under the weight of my resurgent agony.

“What the Hell are you doing?”

The streaming sunlight touched me, the hours I spent waiting for the events I just experienced to appear on screen catching up to me just as the morning did, and with that gentle touch of light, I screamed again. It entered my veins, spread across my skin like a spider’s web, the pain of the unbelievable and the unbelieved, a pain only expressible by a howl that had my boss covering his ears, had him rushing for the phone, dialing only three ubiquitous numbers.

He never hit send on that call, however, he couldn’t keep himself away from my frenzied questions directed at whatever Thing sent the stranger to me, asking where he was, asking where he went, asking nothing in particular as I babbled on the floor of the staff lounge.

After what could quite charitably be described as listening, my boss nodding intermittently throughout my terrified recounting of the previous night at nothing in particular, accentuating my feelings of isolation, he simply sighed. He wouldn’t call anyone, at least not for me. He called in someone to cover my shift that night, but just one shift, that’s all I’d get. In the meantime, he had told me, it was best I go home and get my mind wrapped around things.

So I did just that.

There had been a stranger, of that I’m certain. Not because there’s proof, or footage, or anything resembling a reasonable explanation for any of what happened, but instead because I saw him. The lenses of cameras and the wires of electronics were designed with hands that only touched the physical. But the eyes weren’t made the same, they weren’t made with us in mind.

Evolution has no plan, no grand narrative, only a directive: Make, don’t die, then make some more. That 7th grade biology lesson isn’t what the stranger taught me, however. What he taught me was that we weren’t made with us in mind. We’re just the product of code mashing together, code that doesn’t think about us, can’t create with purpose, and most of all, draws from a pool so large that it couldn't even see us with a microscope if it tried thanks to its universal size.

I wouldn’t say I saw the stranger by accident, or that there was some mistake made, as that would imply some set rule for human existence that was deviated from when the stranger entered the store. I will say that he wasn’t from the same world my eyes evolved to see, that cameras were designed to record. It’s not like he came from a world where time was made with him in mind either, it seems, so in that regard, we can relate. In that regard, he’s human.

There was one thing made with both of us in mind, however. Something that can sit for time immemorial, that can’t be moved, or tampered with, or traced back to any possible origin. Something that can jump dimensions, transcend time, and most importantly, reside on the counter of a North Dakota gas station.

No soda…