August 14 - 24/7
Memory really is fickle sometimes.
There’s a strange monotony to the graveyard shift. I’ve worked my fair share of them in my time -- positions at grocery stores and shitty diners, all of them needing someone, anyone, to just be a warm body when nobody else wants to be there. At most jobs like this you make a few, I wouldn’t call them friends, but at least acquaintances; people you’re fairly capable of holding a surprisingly lengthy and utterly uninteresting conversation with, but who you’d never dare see outside this one curious context.
On a graveyard shift, though, you never find those people. Everyone on the job is a loner, for lack of a better word, someone who’s happy to deal with the total lack of anything interesting in exchange for maybe time and a quarter. So while I recognized the other soul with me on this particular evening in the All-Nite Mart, I never really knew anything about her. I think her name was Annabelle (though we didn’t have name tags, so who knows), and she had enough piercings that it must have made most trips through any form of security a real nightmare. She kept her headphones in while she mopped the floors and stocked the shelves, and I’d watch her amiably while I kept up my position behind the register. In my time working there, maybe a year by now, she’d only ever said a few dozen words to me.
God knows why they had both of us on shift. It was barely enough work for one customer service professional, but they split it across two people. Maybe I don’t have the necessary business acumen or whatever, but I just think the ANM was horribly overmanaged.
An older woman walked through the door, the distorted electronic bell signaling her arrival. I barely looked up from whatever inane thing I was doing on my phone to acknowledge her presence. It was enough to take in her face, though. There was something strange about it. It was as if it didn’t fit quite correctly, as if there was some slack in the mask around her skull. Her wrinkles seemed unnaturally exaggerated, and the bags around her eyes were deep enough to fall into. I quickly looked away, unsettled and trying desperately not to look creepy while she started to aimlessly wander the shelves.
And yet I couldn’t stop looking at her. There was something so odd about her gait, as if her legs and arms weren’t fully under her own control; occasionally she’d misstep, or her muscles would give an unnerving spasm, and each time it looked as if it really hurt her. A shiver went down my spine, but I convinced my slowly panicking brain that everything was normal. Eventually, she disappeared around a shelf, and she was out of my view. I released a breath I didn’t know I was holding, and returned to whatever inane nonsense continued to be on my phone.
A few minutes later, no more than maybe ten, the woman came back, moving to leave the store. She carried nothing, so I barely acknowledged her as she slowly walked out. Something about her looked different, though. Her septum was pierced, which I found unusual on a woman that old; I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t noticed it earlier.
But eventually the shift was over, and the woman was long gone. I was alone in the store, but the moment Dave from the morning shift walked in, I was clocked out and driving away. Something about that night stuck with me for a long while after, though. There was a fear I had felt that I’d never felt since; I was happy to stay in the ANM for a full shift without seeing another person, but seeing that woman while nobody else was there made me a kind of nervous I can’t quite describe.