Poe at the 7–11

All life, all life, reduces to a flickering candle in a drafty room, a dancing flame, and who cannot fear for the worse, that pitiful melting candle, the cold, brutal merciless night-

Oh 2.89 a gallon. That’s pretty good.

I start select my fuel grade, lift the handle, and follow the instructions displayed on the screen to regurgitate sustenance into my defeated Escort, so much like a crow returning to the nest to vomit into the belly of a starving chick.

Or so it seems to me sometimes.

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Colorful images populate e monitor screen as I squeeze the handle on the pump to encourage the reluctant flow (Don’t I know enough about that! But that’s a story for another day). The advertisement changes. A paid vendor is spotlighted in this commercial theater now, an attractive, cosmetically altered Iago with a lucrative royalty contract. She is adorned in casual garb, stands in her scullery, reminding everyone that sometimes when they are hungry, they really just need to drink some water because that’s really what it is.

I think about a tender steak, and roasted potatoes with sear marks on their crackly brown jackets. I’m hungry.

I have prepaid five dollars, and as I approach the limit, (4.80, 4.81), the numbers tick slower, like the tut-tut of a wagging, disgusted tongue, ready for a lecture about penny pinching, as it metes out cent by cent the blood and placenta of a skeletal Egyptian mother.

A wench approaches, distracting me from the public television on the pump monitor screen.

She has pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her greasy, tangled head. Her sweatpants are stained, but not with sweat. The soil marks are of an indistinguishable character. Perhaps they are grease stains from pavement. She has no finer bed than pavement. The clouds she knows don’t roll in from the sea, riding a languorous midnight wind, but they are clouds of pollution, sickly sweet, stinging car exhaust, cigarette smoke.

She asks if I can help her. Tears start to her eyes, half obscured by the shadow of her Reaper’s raiment. She excuses herself. She says that she is taking up a collection because she has no money for her mother’s funeral.

I say that I have many fears of being in the same situation, and that have listened in the dark to my wife’s raspy breathing, after she has finally drifted off to a fitful sleep, (well, the same old excuses beforehand, the same old trouble, but that’s a story for another day), and that I meant to throw myself on the mercy of the coroner, of friends, and that perhaps I would be reduced to the same circumstances as her, very soon, begging for assistance on dusty roads.

I suggest we steal some Coors Light from the Beer Cave, head over to watch the sunset from the edge of the overpass, where the prairie dogs emerge from their catacombs to nibble on whitened cut stems of lettuce heads, so much like bones, and themselves so much like diligent friars, and while we watch them and drink I can tell her about my theory of literature.

She stares for a moment, then turns and walks away without making conventional remarks of departure.

I wonder if she is a prostitute. For myself, I am not interested in procuring her services. I do have some interest, very, very vague interest in knowing if she knows another prostitute, perhaps a little cleaner, perhaps with a frayed-but-clean red dress. This kind of a whore might prove an amusing companion. Perhaps she has only begun her final slide into illness and old age. She still scores a few extra bucks from time to time, which she uses to fly to Vegas on gotta-get-away online deals, gets blistered on airline cocktails and holes up in an off-off-off the Strip Rodeway inn. Perhaps she still uses a broken comb to draw back her hair in the habitual but ineffective manner of a coquettish maiden, though those years are so long gone, and her leering smile fails to hide her rotting teeth-you know… that sort of prostitute. With that sort of dragonish whore, I might share a Coors Light and my theory of literature, and after that, who knows? But I feel some trepidation about asking. I might incur an offense. Sometimes women are so touchy.

I enter the store. It seems as though I leave the straggling rays of sunset with me on the gritty, oily threshold. The flourescent lights hum. Cynthia is the cashier. I nod to her. She watches me with suspicion.

“Where’s Greg?” I call out.

She does not answer.

“The EBT cards aren’t for the hot food,” she finally says.

I grab a plastic basket.

“We’ve been over that many times,” I say.

“We’re out of the single-serve wine and we still don’t have the Amontillado. We will never have the Amontillado. Ever.”

I replace my basket near the door.

“I’ll call here again tomorrow,” I assure her. “You never know.”