Malicious, bleary-eyed scammers, payola and crime and all that. It wasn’t a life I knew, was acquainted with at all.
But I liked to dream about it anyway.
My favorite movies were Dreamgirls and The Godfather Part I, in that order. On my night shift, I was in control of the television, so I would play these films on a loop. This irritated Bob.
“Why the fuck would you do that?” and I would snap my gum and shrug. Occasionally I put on The Lorax just to placate him a bit. I’m not so repetitious, I was trying to say. I’m not a circle after all.
“Not a circle, but a square, sure.” This is what Jessa would say. Jessa was my only real friend. We would meet up in the morning, when she relieved me of my midnight duties. I started work usually 8 or 9 p.m. at the station. Then Jessa would come in at, say, 4 or 5 a.m. It was a good sort of schedule. I never was used to sleeping at night. As a child, the unsettled blackness scared me. I didn’t see monsters or shapes in the shadows; I saw nothing.
Daytime, sunlight, you know what’s around you. Even if someone burglarizes you, or a terrorist drops a nuke, or a tiger breaks in—these are all things within the world. Our imagination is confined to things within our dimensional limits (light, outcast, shadow, stone). I sleep best in the daytime.
Anyway, I never had trouble staying up at night. But I would make Jessa a cup of black coffee, because she did. She always drank it black, no sugar, no cream.
“Do you make it like this at home?” I would ask her. Jessa had a little baby boy who her grandmother watched over. She took college classes during the slats of light where work was nonexistent.
“No,” she said, with an easy grimace. “But this wakes me up.”
I loved Jessa, mainly because she would talk to me. Bob said it was because she didn’t see me watch the same two movies every night. I guess Bob would talk to me too, except he had to. He was the owner of the shop.
And I thought my life was a little dull, a kind of placidity that I liked. There was nothing to imagine to myself except a dirty plastic gauze. Some film had settled itself—or, more accurately, I had cocooned myself in it. I was stuck, tightly bound. Good.
But then it was 3 a.m. on a Tuesday, and Jessa was supposed to come in. The darkness was leaving its shawl, shedding itself, as she entered the purview of the gas station lights. The Lorax was playing then; I remember it was the song about the trufflalas.
“Good evening, Leigh,” she said. It was our little joke. We never knew if it was morning or night.
“Good evening, Jess,” Bob said, and we couldn’t see where he spoke from. It was a little alarming. He usually sat in the back, smoking or playing digital poker. One time he made twenty-five dollars. He was rather proud of that.
Jessa was taking her scarf off, the shawl, and instinctively I looked behind her. The glass had not been cleaned (my job!) but Bob always says: it’s good to deter people from coming in. And Bob was there, in plaid shirt and jeans.
“Bob,” I said, “come in; it’s cold.”
Jessa angled her face to peer, and at that moment, he smiled. And I screamed. I didn’t see the gun, I didn’t even see his hands move. One moment, he was a plastic figure, smiling outside of his store. The next, well. A loose assembly of blood and bones.
Jessa didn’t scream, didn’t cry, she picked up the phone. I found myself moving, thinking if only, as if I could recollect the man… but I picked him up and bits fell through my fingers. His jaw clacked, I thought he would speak, but I realized you could maneuver him like a ceramic skeleton… in some lab…
The paramedics were fast, but not fast enough. One kind man was talking to me, saying where a laundromat was, or something. I don’t know. All I knew was Jessa shut down the store, and as I went home, I held out my palms into the beginning day. Stained sacristy. Wherever you go, life happens to you, I thought. The color of Bob’s eyes began to seep into the sky.
Yuna Kang is a queer, half-deaf, Korean-American writer based in Northern California. She loves postcards, crows, and cats. Yuna is also the recipient of the 2024 New Feathers Award.