Gas Station Stories

Summer had always been my favourite season. When I was a small child, our parents had always taken us to the lake house, where time flew slower, heat lingered longer, and the summer air was ripe with promise. Even now, I feel a profound sense of fulfilment whenever I think about summer—its promises before me, waiting to materialise. I would never have imagined summer to be the season I would choose to take my life. Neither would I have thought myself to be the kind of person to do it so publicly.

There was a dreaminess in my steps, as I walked across the yard of the lake house, each step heavier than the step before. I hoped the rope I had found in the attic would dangle my lifeless body from the mighty maple that stretched endlessly upward, its branches heavy with the orange leaves that coloured the memories of my childhood summers. I shook my head. I knew it would. Despite being old, it seemed strong—a thick rope made of hemp, a rope that could handle everything I could demand of it.

‘What?… You can’t fire me—I’ve always been a diligent employee…, I… I don’t deserve this… Just give me a chance to prove myself.’

I could tell my pleading was in vain. The HR manager looked at me, ready—eager even—to tell me to leave before he had to call security. I felt as though he enjoyed this dance of ours: there was something about him that told me that he hadn’t simply found himself in the position, but rather sought it out.

His shirt had a starched collar and I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that all his wife did was stay at home and take care of his laundry. It was all she did; she got up in the morning, fixed him some kind of breakfast, then went and got a fresh shirt, starched a collar, and laid it out for him to wear to work. Their marriage had to be a dead one, one of secret contempt and prolonged silences during dinner.

‘I’m sorry, but the economy…, I’m sure you understand.’ He cleared his throat, a bit too practised mechanical, then continued, ‘I’m sure you’ll be able to find a job in no time—you’re young, you’re qualified, and we wrote you an excellent reference.’

Of course he had been wrong. I had not been able to find a job—after a few months spent piled on the living room sofa, waiting for replies that never came, my savings had molten away. I had taken a part-time job at the gas station. Graveyard shift—the pay was better and afforded me the luxury of continuing to live in my flat, blissfully unaware of the changes unfurling during the day. I had tried to start a blog to chronicle my experience, but given up.No one wanted to read post after post about someone so utterly lost in life, devoid of dreams and ambitions. I would have liked to tell my story, but there was no story to tell, no narrative to forge, and so I didn’t. I had thought about branching out into politics or criticism, but I could not torture myself sufficiently to produce something of adequate quality. Like everything I had done or achieved before, it was competent, but lacked soul—like me.

It had been freeing to give up, just as it had been freeing to become a night-person, wasting away behind a counter in a bright blue uniform. I felt vaguely threatened by the new gas pumps they had installed—you could just pay at those, using your card—but then been assuaged by the realisation that the night customers preferred to use cash.

I liked to imagine their lives: a couple driving home from a holiday somewhere up North, both of them tired, now stopping for the last time before falling into bed, a few teenagers buying some beers for their party in the woods, a lonely writer buying some instant noodles for a midnight dinner. It made me feel closer to the anonymous masses that rarely acknowledged me, only telling me the number of their pump, showing me their ID, or, in rare cases, waving their card before tapping it against the terminal, then signing to receipt.

It was a lonely experience, holed up behind the counter, languidly hitting buttons on the cash register, standing up sporadically to get cigarettes or tobacco. On busy nights, I would have a co-worker next to me—usually a teenager tapping away at their phone, barely realising there were customers waiting to be deserved. I found solace knowing that I didn’t have to speak to anyone, so long as I worked with one of them. They didn’t tend to stay for long. A few months at the most, before they found something more desirable.

‘Sorry to disturb you, but do you sell eggs?’ She spoke with an accent he couldn’t quite place and looked at him with bright eyes. I was sure she was some hotshot lawyer or software engineer. She didn’t quite fit in, dressed in a light grey blouse, cradling a packet of flour and a carton of milk.

‘Making pancakes?’ My voice sounded stilted, painfully forming words. ‘There should be eggs next to the milk—‘ I stood up to gesture to the small fridge next to the dry goods. ‘If there are none I can go in the back and fetch you some. Any preferences?’

‘Yeah. Got a craving for them.’ She shrugged and placed her items on the counter. ‘And unless, I’m as blind as my girlfriend says, I’d have seen those eggs. I’d prefer organic, but you don’t have those have you? I mean,’ she gestured toward the milk, ‘that one’s the dodgy kind you don’t buy in a grocery store…’ There was a twinkle in her eyes. I was not sure why—it was three a.m. on a Monday, yet she seemed happy, excited even, to be here. I felt like there was something gravely important I had missed.

‘Afraid we only have non-organic-not-actually-specified eggs.’ I tried an apologetic smile, but wasn’t sure it worked. ‘I’ll assume you want them nonetheless…’ I turned around and fiddled with the lock to get into the storage room. I didn’t know if we had eggs in there—normally, a colleague of mine would go to the grocery store and pick up a handful of cartons to sell.

Luckily, we had three cartons left, all filled with ten intact, white eggs. Medium. I handed them to her. ‘Would you be so kind as to put the other two in the fridge?’ She nodded, still smiling. My voice grew smoother, taking on a normal tone. ‘Thank you so much. Will that be all or do you want anything else? Cigarettes, a coffee?’

‘Oh no, thank you.’ She held up a hand, before digging through her purse to produce her wallet, elegantly shaped, black, the logo of a designer applied in gold. ‘I really shouldn’t drink a coffee this time of night.’ I scanned her items, savouring the satisfying beep the reader made.

‘That’ll be $12.15. Cash or card?’ Silently, she produced a credit card, proceeded to tap it and wished me a good night. On her way out, she gingerly placed the two egg cartons in the fridge, before turning to me and waving goodbye.

From that day onward, she became a regular, buying groceries every two or three days, always wearing a blouse, carrying an expensive handbag on her right arm, sharing little nuggets of her life. She was an editor for some obscure magazine I’d never heard of—they were popular abroad, she said, winking at me. Her girlfriend didn’t like her working so much, it made her feel as though they were drifting apart, inching away midnight dinner by midnight dinner. She found it ridiculous—‘just because I work late, doesn’t mean we’re strangers sharing a flat’—and would look at him, demanding assurance. Sometimes she took a coffee, then mention how much she regretted it the next time she came—how it’d kept her up all night.

‘So, what’s your story?’ She asked after a few months, clutching spaghetti, pesto basilico, and cocoa puffs, chipper as ever. I had only seen her sad once—a feature she had put a lot of effort in had been canned for being too political.

I wasn’t sure how to respond: would she care to listen? She tended to just throw questions at me, then turn to leave. It was as though the air of open conversation she so carefully projected was nothing more than a farce designed to garner trust. Whenever she was around me, I felt elated somehow, as if her attention alone made me more worthwhile a person. Looking back, it feels strange—almost improper—to trace my downfall to the conversations she would reprint in her magazine. At that point in time, I’d already considered myself fallen; after all, I had no career left and idled away in a gas station, stagnant, removed from the realities of life.

‘It’s the most basic of stories,’ I said nonchalantly, scanning her spaghetti, ‘I was fired and then, you know…, settled for this.’

‘Why don’t you come to my office and we talk about your journey? They really like stuff like that back home… misery porn, if you will, to distract themselves from the banality of their lives.’ She had never told me where ‘home’ was, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t here, and it was worse. ‘Being stuck in a dead end job at a gas station, working the graveyard shift. What does it feel like to fall like this? Great stuff.’ She placed her business card on the counter gingerly and waited for me to read it.

‘No, no, all big cities are alike…, all of them glimmering monuments to capitalism,’ she paused for a moment, then continued in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘no matter how communist the government professes to be’