Late Night Snack
Maeryn works the overnights at a gas bar in the nowhere dot on a map between Grand Falls and Edmundston. She’s not from there but the abundance of French doesn’t bother her. It’s a self-imposed isolation of sorts. The last thing she needs is community. An anglophone in this neck of the woods is a red-headed stepchild, and she fits the mould literally and figuratively.
It’s February and snowing again. Quelle surprise. A plough driver came in at one am; now it’s three. She’s finished her night shift duties and takes a moment to fuck around on TikTok. It’ll be another two hours before what passes for a morning rush kicks in.
A man in a peacoat and jeans walks in and the electronic chime interrupts the buzzing hum of the overhead lights. He catches her off guard – she hasn’t noticed his car pull in on the pump cameras. But there it is, a Land Rover of all things. With tinted windows. Weird.
Maeryn clicks the side-button on her phone and puts it face down. She watches him meander the store, grab a bottle of water and approach the counter.
“Rough night,” he says and puts the bottle on the counter.
“You have no idea.” Maeryn scans the water. The beep is annoyingly loud.
“I collect them, actually.”
“Collect what? That’ll be $2.95.”
“Rough nights. Something of a connoisseur.”
“That’s a strange thing to be proud of.”
He puts his hands on the lotto ticket tray on the counter and leans in. His voice is lyrical and low.
“You’d be surprised what people are proud of, this time of night.”
She doesn’t look up. “Is this the part where you say something flattering and I’m supposed to be grateful for the attention?”
“Is that what you want? To be flattered.”
He winks at her and she ignores it.
“I want to go home.” She pushes the debit machine to him.
“Do you?” The man stands upright and fishes his phone from his pocket, taps it to the device, and it dings with its satisfaction.
“Careful. That sounds like you already know the answer.” She meets his gaze fully for the first time. Bleached blonde hair and eyes between silver and green. His skin is pale, but so is everyone’s this time of year.
“I’m good at questions. Answers, I leave to smart people. Like you.” His smile borders on the uncanny. Heartfelt at the lips yet devoid of warmth in the eyes.
“You don’t seem stupid.” She thinks this is better than scrolling on her phone and keeps playing along.
“I seem however you need me to seem. That’s the trick of it.”
“What trick?” The man’s manner of speaking both unsettles and interests Maeryn.
“You want to know a secret about me?” The smile is back, warmer but somehow still empty.
“Not really.” She glances at the pump camera. Is there someone else traveling with him, or is he alone?
“I’m going to tell you anyway,” he starts. “When I was a kid, we used to catch fireflies. Mason jar, holes punched in the lid with a nail. Whoever caught the most got to decide what happened to the jar.”
“Decide what?” Maeryn finds this curious and sets her elbows on the counter, her chin resting in her palms.
She means to mock him a bit by this, but he doesn’t bite. Instead he leans forward, arms folded in front of him. Their faces are less than a ruler’s length apart. She smiles at him now.
He continues. “Keep it on the nightstand till they died on their own. Let them go, all at once, right under the porch light so you’d see your own catch light up brighter than the bulb for a second. Or –” a shrug, easy, rehearsed perhaps, “shake the jar till the lights went out. Permanently. No more blinking.”
Maeryn straightens and shoots back at him. “There’s always a jar you shake too hard with people like you.”
He stands as well, but doesn’t back away. “People like me? You don’t even know me.”
“You know what I mean.” Her cheeks flush, flustered at her own outburst.
He remains calm and curious. “Tell me anyway.” That damned smile. It sucks her in and she feels like she could tell this stranger anything.
“I never caught anything. I was the thing that got caught.”
“Once?”
“Once was enough.”
“What’d he do?”
“Guess.”
“I’m asking you.”
“And I’m telling you to guess. That’s how the game works. You already know the fucking answer. You just want me to be the one who says it.”
He’s quiet a second. Actually quiet. The smile is gone and for the first time, his eyes are warm, more greenish now. “They kept you.”
Maeryn is suddenly cold and queasy. She nods slowly. “He kept me. Room above his garage. Called it looking after me, like that was supposed to make up for a door that only locked from outside.”
“How long?”
“Long enough to learn every God damned knot in the pine paneling by heart. Long enough that I still can’t be in a room with a solid door without wanting to puke. Long enough to figure out that possession and love feel identical if you don’t know any different.”
Her voice doesn’t shake saying it. It’s rage. “I don’t know why I told you all that.” It’s always there for her and with her, like a hand absently tracing a scar.
He brings her back to the moment. “Is that why you’re not scared right now?”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t scared.”
“You’re doing a terrible job of looking it.”
“Maybe I’m just better at hiding it now.”
Something in his face slips, unguarded, gone fast. No smile. No warmth. Nothing. Just dead. “I always let them go. Every jar. Under the porch light, every single time.”
“You never shook the jar?”
“Not once.”
The spell breaks. “Good for you.”
It’s the man’s turn to be untethered, angry. “Nobody ever said good for you. Before school, she’d watch me do it from the kitchen window, arms crossed, and say it like she was spitting out a seed. Soft. Just that. Soft, and go back to her dishes.”
“She.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Bullshit, it clearly does. You said it the way you’d say a bruise is fine.”
“You don’t know me.”
Maeryn laughs and her own bright eyes spark with ire. “No, but I know you walked in here in the middle of the night for some reason. Maybe to catch something. Me, maybe? And you’re already telling me you always let them go. What the eff? That’s not a line. That’s a weird-ass alibi. And you ain’t even done nothing yet.”
“Maybe I want to be caught for once.” He’s at his full height now, taller than he initially appeared.
She isn’t about to let him wriggle off his own hook. “That’s not how the game works either.”
“Isn’t it?”
“You don’t get to be the thing in the jar, dude. You gave that up when you started hunting fireflies. You can’t unring that bell.”
He laughs, short, a little wrecked. “You’re better at this than you should be.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve had practice.”
“Come outside. Let’s finish the game properly.”
Maeryn puts her hands behind her back and balls them into fists, her nails digging painfully into her palms. She digs them in harder. Makes herself focus.
“I don’t leave the counter.”
“Then I’ll come to you.”
He’s around the counter before she registers he’s moved. His hand closes over her wrist and yanks it in front of her. Too certain, too cold, like her pulse already belonged to him.
He’s impossibly close now. “Which way do you want this story to end? Nightstand, porch light, or the shake. Pick fast, or I’ll –”
Her free hand finds the box cutter under the register. She thumbs the tab up and swings it in front of her and catches him in the throat, deep and long. The blood gushes out red and dark and splashes her in the face.
He doesn’t finish his threat. The rest of it goes with the gurgle of blood.
He lets go of her wrist and one hand goes to his throat to hold it together and the other wildly grabs for the counter, for her, for anything. Maeryn steps back, pushes the blade to full length and screams at him, thrusting it deep into his chest. It snaps off inside of him and she falls forward through the folding counter flap. He falls forward onto the cash register and knocks it on the floor before collapsing to the floor. Blood, too much blood, empties out of him. And it’s so warm.
It’s just her and the buzzing lights and her own breathing, hard. Her heart is pounding in her throat. Her hands are shaking. She’s not afraid. She’s powerful.
Maeryn is not surprised there is another beep from the door as someone enters. She glances at the camera; the Land Rover is still there, nothing else. Its door, however, is open.
“You,” a woman’s voice says, “are not what I sent him for.”
“No?” She turns to face her. “You were here the whole time.” It isn’t a question.
“He was mine.” The woman is older than Maeryn but not old, brunette, wearing a denim dress that fits her perfectly. She wears a white sweater with a large yellow happy face pinned above the left breast. Weird for a snow storm. Weird for anything, really.
Maeryn is still shaking, but defiant despite the absurdity of it all. “He told me he always let them go. Every one. Like it was supposed to make me trust him.”
“And now he’s a stain on the floor.”
“My floor, actually. I mop it.” Maeryn laughs a bit at her own joke.
The woman steps into the space behind the counter with Maeryn and doesn’t flinch at the blood, or at her, or at any of it. She looks at the younger woman and cocks her head. “You should be on your knees right now. Screaming. Running. There’s a script for this.”
“I know the script. I don’t like my part.”
“What do you want then?”
“You know what I want. You knew when you sent him in here.”
“Say it anyway.”
“I want to be the one who decides. Nightstand, porch light, or the shake.”
The woman grabs Maeryn by the wrist, the same as the man had done. She isn’t afraid this time. No box-cutter. It doesn’t matter.
“Let go of me.” Low, almost a growl. Not a request.
The woman lets go. Unhurried. “Cute.” She moves around to the front of the counter.
No vomit. Not this time. She looks at the woman. “Nightstand. Porch light. Or the shake.” Something is there that isn’t quite a smile. “Which one are you?”
“Come with me and find out.”
Maeryn looks back once at the register knocked to the floor, at the dark mess that used to be a man, at a floor she won’t have to mop.
The two women get into the Land Rover and drive into the strengthening blizzard.
