Lollygagger

The crisp air of the post rain evening stung Benson’s nose as he jogged to the front door of Game Gods Galaxy, the only game store in Pteetneet City that was open late. He was almost late for the night shift, but made it through the doors just before the clock turned over to 10pm. He wriggled out of his thin green jacket and draped it across the stool behind the counter.

“You’re late Benson,” Tina said with a snap of her chewing gum. It had stained her tongue purple.

“I’m right on time, Tea-nuh” Benson said and pointed to the digital clock above the door, “see, 10pm.”

“You’re supposed to get here early to count the till,” she whined in sing song.

He had already pulled out the register till and quickly counted through it.

“Numbers match, you are good to go.”

Tina stood staring at him, ponytail cocked to one side, chewing on her gum and breathing the quick-stale scent of grape bubblegum. She blew a bubble and it burst in a spatter of purple.

“Go, get out of here,” Benson shooed her with a hand and leaned back on the stool.

The rain started to sprinkle in the parking lot and Tina slipped on a tomato-colored rain jacket and made her way around to the front of the counter. She stopped and pulled a bubblegum sucker out of a tin can filled with them. She peeled at the wrapper with long fingernails.

“Kevin wants you to test out the tarot deck under the counter; a local woman brought it in and wants to sell it. Oh, and a guy came in about two hours ago. He was a little weird,” Tina said and popped the sucker in her mouth.

“Weird how?”

“He was wearing all black and had a hood over his face. I tried to ask if he wanted any help, but he walked right by the counter and into the Family Night section. He stared at the shelves for a while and then moved into the Party Games section and stared at those shelves for a while. Just kind of standing there and shaking a little.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for him,” Benson said.

“I mean, you don’t really have to. He’s still here. He’s been in the RPG Room for about half an hour.”

Game Gods Galaxy was split into three different rooms. The main room with displays and shelves of categorized games. The second room filled with Role Playing Games, miniatures, dice of various sizes, and other table-top essentials. The final room, The Game Play Room, was a large room in the rear that held a dozen tables that were reservable; customers could even rent games from the front desk to play before they purchased.

The RPG Room and the Game Play Room both had video cameras so that clerks could keep an eye on those rooms and remain by the door for questions, sales, and security. Benson looked down at the camera in the RPG Room and saw in the black and white feedback and saw an indiscriminate person standing, their back to the video feed, staring at the rear corner wall.

“What are they staring at? There isn’t even a display in that corner,” Benson said.

“You’re problem now!” Tina said and the bell at the front door jangled for her departure before Benson could look up again.

The camera feed froze and pixelated for a second and popped back on with the strange person still standing in the corner.

The kind of place that gets just a little chilly.

Benson leaned back in the chair and pulled out the deck of tarot cards.

“The Pteetneet Cryptic, huh,” he began to shuffle the cards. He kept one eye trained on the video feed.

He flipped over a card revealing The Hitchhiker’s Thumb, a cartoonish photo of a young girl in yellow brandishing her thumb as a broken-down car steered to a stop on the shoulder of the road. She’s grinning wide at an unseen camera. He set the card on the desk.

The camera feed froze and pixelated again, but when it returned to normal the RPG Room was empty.

The kind of place that still smells of fresh dirt.

Benson dropped the deck of cards on the counter. He nearly toppled the chair in his rush to get standing. He looked around the counter, but no one was there.

“Hello?” Benson called out.

A growl of thunder responded to Benson as the rain outside picked up pace. The fluorescent lights flickered.

The camera feed froze and pixelated again and then the strange man was standing in the Game Play Room.

The kind of place that has a tin roof and cement floor.

Benson looked up to see the clock at 10:10pm. He settled back into his stool and shuffled the deck of cards again. It was going to be a long night.

Over the next three and a half hours Benson sold two decks of tarot, a set of clear dice with little unicorns in the center, a playing mat, and a board game featuring superheroes versus zombies. For a random weeknight the sales were not so bad on the late shift.

The stranger would move every thirty minutes or so. His movement was quick, jittery, like a hummingbird. Then he would stand still in some random area of the store.

“Is that guy okay?” a man asked as he put down a large figurine of a fat ogre brandishing a spiked club onto the counter.

“I think it’s a homeless guy just trying to escape the rain, get warm,” Benson had been idling the theory in the back of his head for an hour. It sounded more believable coming out of his mouth.

“I think he might be on drugs,” the customer drawled through heavy cheeks and added a candy bar to his purchase.

“Probably, but he’s been overall harmless. Doesn’t disturb anything, doesn’t bother me, doesn’t make… idle chit-chat. That’ll be seventeen dollars and twenty-three cents.”

The customer mumbled some kind of recommendations about calling the police and fucking off and the door jangled behind him.

“Oh, wait, sir, are you interested in a local set of taro-oooh,” Benson grinned a wide toothy grin as the customer’s taillights glimmered away in the puddles of the parking lot outside. He gathered the deck of cards and concentrated on shuffling them back into their shiny box.

The Hitchhiker’s Thumb fell to the ground and slid halfway under the counter. Benson leapt off the stool and scraped his sneaker against the stool. The wood stool screeched against the polished floors as he bent to retrieve the card.

He slid it from under the counter and stopped himself in a crouched position. Something about the card was different. Did the little girl always look that frightened? Was the car always brand new? Hadn’t the girl been smiling? Wasn’t the car supposed to be pulling into the shoulder of the road? He didn’t remember the headlights – barreling down the center of the road.

Benson stood up to find himself face to, well, kind of face, with the stranger. The stranger’s face was part hidden in medium lengthy dark hair and part hidden by the droopy hood. All features were gender nonspecific and overall colorless. The dry, cracked lips, appeared to be mumbling some indecipherable mantra on repeat. He dropped the deck of cards and they sprayed across the floor in a rainbow around his feet. He fumbled against the rental game wall, catching his arm on a random bowl, dumping several dozen rubber farm animal dice to the floor.

“Fuck man,” Benson said, “I have to clean this shit up.”

The stranger just stood there. They shivered, no, not shivered. They vibrated, they purred like a kitten settling in for a nap. They hummed. They froze and pixelated for a split second.

Benson composed himself, rubbed his eyes, and shook his head.

“You know what, man, I’ve been really generous to let you stay in here all night. We close in less than thirty minutes. I think it’s time you either made a purchase or found your home for the night.”

Benson waited for a response, but didn’t get one.

“You can’t stay here all night.”

Benson waved his hand in front of the stranger’s face.

“Come on man, don’t make me call the police tonight. It will be a whole thing, and I know we both just want to go to bed.”

Benson reached up slowly to pull back at the hood. He wanted a better look at the person. Before his finger brushed their hood the stranger pulled away in a motion that reminded Benson of a broken animatronic suddenly returning to life. They chittered and chattered as they reversed slowly, quickly, slowly, and floated, glided, spasmed, to the front door of Game Gods Galaxy.

“Thank cheesus,” Benson said. He leaned back over and started collecting the scattered cards. He quickly shuffled them into place, not caring if they were all front to back. The bell on the door rang.

“See you never, bro,” Benson mumbled to himself. The bell on the door rang.

“The fuck, bye,” Benson said. The bell on the door rang.

Benson stood up and started to shout but saw the stranger gripping the doorframe of the store, convulsing, grinding their hips and in out of the doorway, catching at the bell’s trigger. The bell on the door rang. Foam streamed from the stranger’s mouth. Blood began to trickle from the tight grip on the metal frame.

“Oh fuck, oh gods,” Benson ran from behind the counter and ran to the stranger. He reached his hand out and touched them.

The black jacket dropped, empty, into Benson’s outstretched hand. His momentum threw him from the storefront, and he landed in a shallow, cold, puddle in the rain outside.

Purple lightning cracked around Benson’s head in jagged crayon-like bursts of childhood drawings. It flashed in the night sky and unzipped the skin of his face, bursting light from every pore as his skull cracked open and his brain imploded with pain.

“The fuck was that,” Benson pulled himself up and out of the frigid water. He felt the four o’clock shadow on his otherwise smooth jawline and cheek. He wiped off some of the gravel from his hand. Most of the puddle ended up on the stranger’s jacket. He took it back into the store and searched the pockets. They were empty.

“The fuck was that!” Benson said.

Benson knew that the cameras on the desk were to keep a quick eye on the other rooms, and a little bit of show to keep customers in line, but the real security cameras were available on the computer and included footage of the main room. Benson turned on the desktop and pulled open the cameras. He found the main room and began to scroll backward in the footage. He watched himself as he pulled comically backward out of a puddle, then he stood and clutched hooded black jacket out of the door and then back into the door. He clutched the jacket and ran in reverse out of view.

He played it forward and watched himself run through the room, holding a black hooded jacket, reaching out as if he was trying to catch someone who left their jacket before they got too far. He watched himself slip and fall in the ice. He rewound it and watched himself run back and forth. He watched it again and again.

There was no stranger. Just him playing out a scene alone.

He rewound the film farther to see who may have brought the jacket in, but he couldn’t locate anyone that came or left with a black hooded jacket.

He had been clutching at the jacket, the warmth of its cotton a security blanket against the eerie happenings of the night. It was 2:30am and he should be long out the front door. He needed to lock up. He needed to go home. He needed to get some good sleep.

He hurried into a hack job of cleaning up, making things as orderly as possible, counting the till only once, and running a broom over the immediate area.

He tossed the black jacket onto a chair and grabbed his own green jacket, slipping into it quickly. He turned off the lights and locked the door. The rain had mostly stopped, a fine mist floated through the air and Benson flipped his hood over his head.

He looked through the darkened parking lot, there was no moon in sight. The only light came from the yellowed beams of the bug infested parking lot overheads. He walked into the lot and looked back and forth. Where had he parked?

Then he remembered he had walked to work that day. He dropped his car keys into the bushes outside the door and began his journey home. It had been such a strange night. Tina had been weirdly nice to him, he got to test out a cool deck of cards, made some decent sales. If he was remembering correct, he even got to lock up a little early and go… he was going…

Where was he going?

He found himself outside a local twenty-four-hour grocer. The kind of place that has tight squeezes between aisles. The kind of place where pallets of fresh produce sat in worn plank boxes. The kind of place you want to take your kids. The kind of place where mushrooms grow from cardboard containers. The kind of place where you can find mountains of tomatoes, more than you’ll ever need, sitting next to seven cactus leaves (which also happened to be more than you would ever need.) The kind of place that stretches through large warehouse spaces.

It was fascinating.

Garlic hung like grape bunches from twine ropes next to tangles of dried peppers. Fascinating.

Tanks of oysters bubbled under flowing water from live fish tanks. All behind a rainbow assortment of fish on ice. Astounding.

The floral section housed a brilliant flood of visual delight in soft petals and twisting vines. Intriguing.

There was a section with beehives and fresh honey, the scent bled from the glass jars. There was a section of live bees under a glass window. Riveting.

But the bees themselves seemed to move both fast and slow. In some ways it was like watching something in fast forward, but as he swept his eyes along the colony it often felt in reverse. Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

They were moving out of sync with time. Benson looked up to find another person. There was a cashier near the entrance and an older gentleman carrying a jar of sauerkraut.

“Excuse me,” Benson called out.

The older gentleman sped up to fast forward as the cashier began to check him out in reverse. Benson looked out the window to see the rain falling onto the panes of glass as quickly as they fell off the glass and back up to the black clouds above. A roll of thunder clapped at Benson’s ears moments before a scattered purple lightning bolt lit up the sky.

Benson felt like a shredded carrot stuck in a Jello mold. He turned to a section of melons and watched as one of the melons jostled and burst. Vines like spider legs burst from the melon, growing and pushing outward, bending. It was like watching one of those daily photo projects of a budding seed come to life before your eyes.

More melons followed the first. The melons pushed themselves up and tested out their spidery limbs and began to scatter. Lights flickered and dust hung transfixed in the air as the melon spiders tripped and trounced with clipped speed.

Benson turned and move as quickly as he could back to into floral. He entered through the rubber mats of the cooler room and brushed up against a bucket holding sheaves of pink and orange gladiolas. As he thought out his next move the gladiolas twisted and bulged, grew tiny little suction cups, and slithered like snakes across his shoulders, aiming to latch around his throat.

Benson was slow to take notice and when he did he slapped at the flowery tentacles that continued to grow and multiply. The wall of flowers all began to twist and transform.

The lights outside turned from day to night, then back, the moon winked out of existence and then spread at a slow rate into full moon, then it repeated it quicker and in reverse.

Fancy bathroom soaps spread wings and flew, perching on Benson’s shoulders, shitting soapy turds on the top of his head as they burst into a flock and headed to the rafters.

People came and people left. Shaky. Glitchy people.

The kind of place you can never escape.

Farm Fresh Eggs hatched into unseen nightmares, their invisible claws leaving scratch marks in fresh baked loaves of bread, their eyes glowing red in the periphery.

Somewhere in the dairy section a Möbius blob of yogurt was coughing up stringy gobs of blueberries into a dark pitted void.

Benson understood that he no longer existed in time or space.

He turned in a circle for what felt like a blink of eternity and faced the cashier.

“Whatever you do,” he screamed, “do not touch me.”

Benson moved to exit the store. He wasn’t sure if he felt the hand or if he was about to feel the hand.

The hand landed on his shoulder and he dropped his jacket.

The End