STOP'N'STOP - Short Story

Below the cut: you can see how I am not cut out for short stories very very clear in this one, because when it's not a full novel, I get bored and cut it off prematurely. If you want to read a novel, Iscariot is now available. I linked the kindle version because of Amazon de-prioritizing books, but the paperback is available as well. 

STOP-N-STOP

An essay by Trent Russell, as provided by Aurora Dimitre

            I had run away from home when it wasn’t really considered running away from home anymore – I’d graduated from high school the previous spring and, after coming home from half a semester of college basically ready to drop out, my parents had said that if I did, I was gone. So I left. It did all turn out okay, in the end. I reconciled with my parents and I went back to school and I got a business degree. But one thing that’s never really seemed right in my memory is a gas station I stopped at for ice cream and a warm place to sit for half an hour.

            I’d been away from home for half a week at that point. I’d taken a bus out to some Midwestern city, and then I’d hitched a ride to a smaller Midwestern city – and in the Midwest, ‘small city’ normally means somewhere around twenty thousand people, so when I managed to hitch a ride to a place even smaller than that, you can imagine how tiny the town was. The guy I’d hitched a ride from had dropped me off at the outskirts of the town, and I’d stood there for a couple of minutes, shivering and rubbing at my elbows and wondering if maybe I could get a ride to a town that was big enough to have motels or an all-night Wal-Mart that I could crash in for a couple of hours.

            My gaze caught a sign, lit up against the sky – a Stop-N-Go. Even back then I thought it was stupid to go for ice cream when I’d run away from home, had maybe a couple hundred bucks between my cash and my checking account, and it was definitely below freezing, but I was desperate that night. I was tired and cold and hungry and there was nothing I wanted more than a triple-scoop of Moose Tracks in a waffle cone. So I made my way to the gas station. It wasn’t too busy. Not like I was expecting it to be busy – the town was too small that unless there was some sort of convention at the closest bigger city, there wouldn’t be more than five people inside at a time. But my point is, I got my ice cream fast.

            I sat down at one of the tables, which was a weird sort of off-orange rather than the usual Stop-N-Go red, and I was pretty prepared to stay for a good half hour, maybe forty-five minutes if I got really comfortable.

            I stayed for fifteen.

            Weird is the best adjective I have. Not like gas stations at night are ever very comfortable, but it was only nine, and that made everything that much worse. First of all, even though there were cars parked outside, at the pumps and everything, I was the only one there but the cashier. I waited at the ice cream counter for a good three minutes before he, a guy who looked probably my age with a beard that was failing to grow in and greasy black hair falling over his forehead in clumps, drifted over. I had to repeat my order about five times, and he left my money on the counter. Even as I sat there and ate my ice cream, I could see it sitting on the counter. He hadn’t picked it up by the time I left.

            When I sat at the table, I didn’t see another human soul. As soon as he gave me my ice cream, the attendant disappeared somewhere behind the counter. There was a radio on somewhere in the gas station, playing snatches of classic rock, country, and static, like someone was changing the station frequently. After five minutes that went dead, too.

            The lights kept flickering. They were fluorescent, so there’s always a weird bit of shakiness there, but they flickered noticeably. Every so often the hum of the ice cream freezer would stop, and then kick back on again with the lights. And even that seems just like regular electrical problems, right? There’s nothing strange about an ice cream machine being faulty.

            Then I heard something fall behind me. At that point I was already pretty jumpy, from being alone, from the cold and the dark, and from the lights that were still flickering, so I jumped nearly a foot in the air and went to check it out. It had come from one of the aisles of junk food, I was pretty sure, and one of them that was pretty close to me, but there was nothing on the floor in any of them. The weird thing was that I didn’t recognize any of the brands. There was no Hersheys, no Doritos, none of it – there were generic brands, but only recognizable as generic by their plain packaging and over-descriptive item names. I wavered in the candy aisle for a few minutes, ice cream somehow not running down my arm even though I’d barely touched my cone and it should have been melting like crazy by now, and searched for something that I recognized. Hot Tamales, Reese’s, anything – but none of it was anything like that. I don’t remember any of the candy names. I don’t remember what they were even ripping off. I kind of remember opening one bag, figuring that it couldn’t do much harm seeing as the attendant still hadn’t come up from behind the counter, and having to drop it because instead of the candy I was expecting it was a large tarantula, crushed into the box with its legs everywhere.

            I went back over to the tables after that. There was a newspaper on the far table, and so I nabbed it. Everything on it was wrong. This was in 2006, so the president at the time was Bush – but the president that this paper was talking about was named Lexington. I wasn’t too into politics when Bush was elected a second time, but I didn’t even remember a Lexington running against him. I didn’t even know if that was a politician at all. The rest of the paper was just as weird – all of the ads were for things I didn’t recognize, and the coupons didn’t seem to understand how coupons worked. They said things like, ‘buy two, buy one more’ and ‘normally six dollars, with this coupon eight’ and what was crazier was the fact that some of them had been ripped out, like someone wanted to use them.

            I heard something else fall then, something in the aisles again, and then a giant clap, and I turned to see all of the milk in the refrigerators on the floor. It was on the floor like it had all just been dropped, nicely in rows, none of them broken or spilled or anything. The lights flickered again. The hum of the ice cream machine flickered again. I needed to take a piss, but I didn’t really want to risk it – in this weird Stop-N-Go, toilets probably didn’t even exist. You had to aim for a toaster or something like that.

            I threw my ice cream away at that point. It was then that I noticed that my change was still on the counter, and that the attendant hadn’t appeared again. It had barely been fifteen minutes but I didn’t want to be there any longer. I’d wanted ice cream, but I’d gotten a little bit more than that, and I figured that even in a town this small, I could find a church to crash in or something.

            So I left. It was surprisingly easy. Easier than I’d expected, honestly, especially when I glanced back and saw the sign that had attracted me to the gas station said ‘Stop-n-Stop’ rather than ‘Stop-n-Go’ like I’d thought.