Rose ( Reworked)

Rose had signed up for the job a week ago. Staying home with her grandmother was starting to eat at her from the inside out. She loved the woman; that wasn’t the problem. Love was the easy part. The hard part was the hush that settled over the house after nine, the way the clock seemed to breathe between ticks, the way the carpeted hallway swallowed footsteps and made her feel like a ghost practicing for later. The days blurred into evenings that smelled like menthol ointment and boiled potatoes. Every sound was familiar to the point of irritation—the fridge’s tired sigh, the baseboard’s soft clicks, the late train two streets over that dragged its lonely whistle through their bedroom curtains. She wanted motion. She wanted a reason to be awake.

When she saw the index card pinned to the cork board at the corner store—NIGHT SHIFT ATTENDANT NEEDED. EDDIE’S GAS STATION. REMOTE. START ASAP.—she tore off the little tab with the number like she was ripping a bandage. Remote was fine. Alone was better. A job was a job, and money meant options she didn’t have right now. Also, and she could admit this to herself, she wanted to prove to her grandmother that she wasn’t as breakable as everyone seemed to think.

On the night of her first shift, she stood in the dim hallway and turned the house key in her fingers. The edges had been smoothed by years of use, warm from her palm. She pictured her grandmother asleep in the narrow bedroom at the back, the dented oxygen concentrator humming beside the bed even though she barely needed it anymore. If Rose went into the room and said, I’m staying, her grandmother would smile in relief and make tea and tell her they’d try again next month. That was exactly why Rose didn’t go in.

She eased the front door open. The hinges let out a long, aching creak that made her wince and freeze. She held her breath, counting to five. No shuffling. No soft voice. Outside, the little street was a dim tunnel between dark pines. Most of the houses had their porch lights off; it was the kind of neighborhood that curled inward after dinner and didn’t uncurl until morning. She stepped onto the porch and pulled the door closed behind her. The old knob clicked. She locked it and checked her phone.

11:40 PM.

Plenty of time on paper. An hour and change to get to Eddie’s, plus a cushion in case the Civic decided to manufacture a new noise.

The car waited beneath the streetlamp, silver dulled by road dust and winters. It had been her parents’ car—was their car in a way that felt both wrong and necessary. She still didn’t like saying after they died out loud. People expected a certain face from you when you said it, and she never got the expression quite right. The Civic smelled faintly of old coffee and the pine tree air freshener she’d stopped replacing because it felt like pretending.

She slid into the driver’s seat, tucked one foot beneath her, and turned the key. The engine coughed, caught, and settled into a stubborn idle. “Good car,” she said, patting the worn steering wheel. Her father’s hands had taught her the feel of a clutch and the timing of a merge. He’d taught her to drive like she belonged on the road, like she wasn’t a problem to be solved. That belonged to before. Since then, she hadn’t driven far from the neighborhood. Tonight would be the longest stretch she’d done alone.

The map app glowed on her phone, mounted at an odd angle with a cracked clip. Eddie’s Gas Station blinked back at her from a black map like a single pixel of permission. The route was a mostly straight vein of highway cutting through spruce and rock. She hit play on her playlist, and Michael Jackson’s “Chicago” jumped in, glossy and smooth. The bass filled the small car, a shield of sound.

She backed out, checked the blind spot twice, and took the empty street toward the highway. Houses gave way to dark lots. Streetlamps thinned. The road grew wider and lonelier. Night in this part of Canada wasn’t theatrical; it was practical and deep, a dark that asked for your headlight beams and gave you back just enough.

The Civic hummed and rattled. She eased it to seventy, the speedometer needle quivering. The forest crowded close in places where the highway cut between rock faces, then fell away to low marshy stretches where the fog lay like folded blankets. Her high beams caught the flash of eyes once—a fox, maybe—and the pale skeleton of a felled birch.

Her phone buzzed at 12:30. She flinched instinctively, then looked when the road opened straight and empty. A text from an unknown number she saved earlier as Boss – Eddie: You’re solo tonight. Lock up when you leave.

That was it. No Welcome aboard. No emergency procedure. The message was so bare it almost made her smile. She wasn’t in the mood for anyone’s small talk, least of all a manager’s. She texted back, Sounds good. On my way, and put the phone back in its cradle.

She tried a sip of the lukewarm water bottle in the cup holder. It tasted like plastic and old summer. The song shifted, but she replayed “Chicago.” She liked the steady drum line, the slick story in the lyrics, the way it made the car feel more expensive, the night less empty. Wind buffeted the Civic, a gentle shove that pushed her back into herself whenever her mind drifted toward the house, toward the way her grandmother’s shoulders slumped when she thought Rose wasn’t looking.

The hand-painted sign for Eddie’s finally showed at the shoulder—a sagging rectangle with a cartoon gas pump and the letters half-flaked away. EDDIE’S. An arrow pointed into a wide gravel lot that glowed under white LEDs. The station looked like a ship floating in dark water: bright island, black around it. Beyond the lot, trees pressed in. The canopy held its own weather—colder, lonelier.

Rose cut the engine and sat a second, hands on the wheel, feeling the sudden quiet crawl into the car. The lights inside the station were already on. A neon OPEN sign hissed at the far window. She glanced around the lot. No other cars. No movement. Her phone read 12:57 AM.

“All right,” she told the empty passenger seat. “Don’t be weird.”

She stepped out and the cold smacked her cheeks. The gravel shifted under her sneakers with a sound that made the station seem even louder in comparison—the buzz of fluorescents, the far-off hum of the coolers. The air smelled like diesel and something sweet from the candy aisle bleeding out through the door’s gap.

The glass door stood half a palm open. She nudged it with her hip. A little bell mounted above it gave a polite ting that felt unearned. A river of refrigerated air rolled over her arms. She regretted the thin top immediately, but there was no way she was going back to the car for a sweater like a skittish kid. She stepped inside.

The place was cleaner than she expected. The floor tiles shone under light that made everything look slightly washed. Rows were straight. Labels faced forward. Whoever Josh Walker was, he’d either cared or he’d been bored out of his skull. The counter stood to the left, a rectangle of Formica with a register, a rack of cigarettes, and a small spiral notebook laid open like a diary.

She went to the notebook first. 12:50 AM — Josh Walker logging off. The handwriting leaned forward like it couldn’t wait to be out the door. A small smiley face sat after the last name, like an apology.

Rose looked up at the clock mounted above the cigarettes. 12:58 AM. “Cutting it close,” she said under her breath, then immediately felt ridiculous for talking aloud.

Her phone vibrated with a phantom notification that wasn’t there. She slid it into her back pocket and hit the register’s login. The training video had made it look simple—scan, press, card; cash drawer pops like a shy mouth. She found the switch for the outside pumps she wasn’t responsible for because they were self-serve. She located the stack of lottery slips and the tiny trash can dedicated to the ones that represented hope and ended as paper snakes.

“Hey, you! I need the bathroom. I don’t need to buy anything, right?”

The voice landed behind her left shoulder. She jumped hard enough to smack her knee on the cabinet. She turned too fast. A man stood near the door. Early thirties maybe. Dark jacket zipped up to his throat. Face ordinary in a way that felt deliberate.

“Sorry,” she said, smile automatic and flat. “Yes, bathroom’s free. Back that way.” She pointed along the far wall.

“Thanks.” He flashed a look that wasn’t quite a smile and headed past the freezers.

Rose watched him go for a second, then looked at the glass. The door. Had the bell rung? It felt like it must have; that’s what bells were for. But the tidy little sound wasn’t in her memory. And she hadn’t seen headlights. The front was all glass; even a motorcycle would have made a light smear.

She told herself to stop. It was late; she was new; the night curled sounds up and swallowed them whole. She set the thought down and picked up the scanner gun to make sure the laser worked.

“Hey, thanks. Have a good night.”

She looked up. The man was already by the door. He pulled it open with two fingers and slipped through. The bell didn’t ring. He was gone.

She waited for the small sound that meant the door had closed. It didn’t come either. The door looked closed, but she couldn’t swear to when it had settled back into the frame.

She checked the clock. 1:45 AM.

Her stomach dropped in a way that felt childish. She had the strong sensation she’d missed a step on a staircase she couldn’t see. “No way,” she whispered. She’d been standing… what? Ten minutes, max. Maybe fifteen. She tried to replay the last half hour and found only thin pieces: the smiley face in the logbook, the feeling of cold on her forearms, the humming light above aisle three that buzzed a shade higher than the others, like it was complaining.

She shook herself. She wasn’t going to be that girl who melted at a register because a clock was rude. Move. Do something. Make the place small and knowable.

She walked the store. Chips, organized by brand and imagined guilt. The candy aisle, a spectrum disciplined into boxes. The drink coolers behind her, their glass sweating. A shelf of motor oil so late in its stock rotation that two bottles had dust slashed through by someone’s finger. Bandages. A display of travel-sized deodorants with names that sounded like colognes trying to win custody. A wire basket of dog treats.

Everything felt recently touched and yet not used. It was like a stage set right after the director said, Ready. No scuffs. No grubby smear where customers pawed at the gum.

The bell rang.

Ting.

She spun so fast her shoulder twinged. The door stood empty, the glass reflecting aisle lights back at her. No one crossing the lot. No tires on gravel. Nothing.

Her mouth dried out instantly. She walked—didn’t run—back to the counter and clicked the CCTV monitor awake. The training video had spent three whole minutes explaining how to rewind. She went backward until she saw herself in the frozen foods reflection, slightly hunched, hand trailing along boxes as she read labels she didn’t absorb.

There. The bell icon blinked in the monitor’s corner—a cutesy overlay someone had paid to add. The front door in the top-left camera opened by an inch. A shadow edged in, matte and wrong against the glass. She leaned closer. A figure stood with its face in the frame for exactly zero seconds, and then—when the version of Rose on the screen turned in surprise—it was gone.

She swallowed hard and hit back again. The frames jumped. This time, the door didn’t open. The icon didn’t blink. It showed her turning toward nothing. She scrubbed backward and forward three more times, palms damp on the plastic mouse, gaining nothing except the sudden understanding that there would be no satisfying third option where a spider had tripped a beam.

“Okay,” she said, which was nothing, and turned away too quickly, knocking the pen cup. Ballpoints rattled.

The clock above the cigarettes said 2:00 AM now, like it was offering a compromise. Fine. Be weird. But move forward while you’re doing it.

She needed coffee. Not wanted. Needed. The employee coffee station huddled by the back room door—industrial machine, thin stack of paper cups, a tub of those sealed creamers that always tasted like a dare. She grabbed a cup. It tugged at her wrist. For a silly half-second she thought it was stuck to the stack, but when it came free into her hand she realized it just felt heavy. Too heavy for paper. When she shifted her grip, the cup tugged down again like a small, wrong gravity sat inside it.

“Stop it,” she told herself, out loud and low, as if she were talking to a skittish dog. She filled it to the line with dark roast, the smell a heavy hand on her face. She was thinking about sugar she didn’t need when a voice landed behind her shoulder the exact same way as before.

“Do you guys sell hot food at this time?”

She whipped around with the cup halfway to her mouth. “HELL NO!” It came out too loud, a flat crack that made the fluorescents seem to vibrate.

The man by the endcap threw his hands up. He was younger than the first one. Blond scruff, red ears. He looked like someone who apologized for bumping into chairs. “Whoa,” he said. “I—I can just grab chips.”

Rose felt the heat in her face ride up to her hairline. “Sorry,” she said, squeezing the word until it turned thin. “It’s been a night. Let me check if there’s anything hot.”

He nodded, still cautious, and hovered where he was like he’d decided the tile under his feet was safe.

She abandoned the coffee and walked the aisles again, this time looking for something that could be heated: a microwave tucked somewhere, a cabinet, a sign. Her eyes skimmed too fast to process. The store seemed to go a breath longer than before; a canned soup display stood where she didn’t remember a display at all. She found a little counter with a warming drawer she would have sworn hadn’t existed five minutes earlier. Inside sat a row of shrink-wrapped breakfast sandwiches sweating in their own condensation.

“Looks like we do have a few options,” she called, and turned with a small, relieved smile that felt almost real.

No one answered.

She blinked into the aisle. Empty. The tile where the man had stood held nothing but shine. She walked back to the counter, coffee abandoned and cooling, and checked the parking lot out the front windows.

No car. No lights receding. No human motion anywhere.

The camera then. She pushed the mouse like it had offended her and rolled backward until she saw herself walking away from the coffee. There he was—blond scruff, red ears—paced out awkwardly toward the door. He paused with his hand on the glass for the length of a thought and then slid through the opening so gently the bell didn’t stir. If the camera had sound, it didn’t admit to it now.

She felt the embarrassed-flush return, heavier this time. Great. If anyone ever watched this footage, it would look like a compilation of her startling at nothing and offending customers into thin air. On her first night, no less. She imagined Boss – Eddie clicking through the timeline with a bored finger, deciding not to text because what would he even say? Hey, try not to act haunted in front of customers?

She took a sip of her coffee and burned her tongue hard enough to taste iron. “Good,” she muttered. “Be cautious.” She set the cup down away from the edge, very aware of the heat, and told herself to do a simple task. Inventory the cigarettes. Count a shelf. Anything to keep her mind from trying to expand to the size of the room.

A flyer on the counter caught her eye: MISSING in black block letters over a low-resolution photo of a girl with a nose ring and a denim jacket. The date beneath was last winter. Someone had drawn a small heart in pen near the bottom right corner, then scratched it out. Rose slid the flyer back under the charity jar without meaning to. Her reflection in the register screen looked a fraction older than sixteen.

She noticed then that the clock over the cigarettes didn’t agree with the timestamp in the corner of the CCTV monitor. The monitor insisted it was 2:07. The wall insisted 2:14. It wasn’t much; a minute here and there could be forgiven by machines that had been set by hands. But when she rewound ten seconds and watched herself take the same sip of coffee twice, the back of her neck tightened.

She wrote her name in the logbook on autopilot—1:00 AM — Rose started shift—then frowned at the indentations beneath. She flipped the page back and saw Josh Walker’s earlier entry duplicated, lighter, as if someone had pressed so hard the paper below had recorded the moment against its will. Her name had left the same faint ghost following it. She ran a finger over the groove and felt nothing, which was somehow worse.

Outside, a gust pushed gravel against the glass in a soft spill. The OPEN sign’s red letters flickered, then held.

She walked to aisle three and pretended to face labels as a way to move. She adjusted three bags of chips so their logos sat straight. As she turned to go back to the counter, she noticed the bag at the end had flipped itself around. Not turned. Flipped—backside out. She stared at it for a count of ten. Her hand lifted, then didn’t. No sound accompanied the movement because there hadn’t been movement, only the fact of after.

“Not funny,” she said to the air, and hated herself for saying it as soon as the words came out.

The next half hour passed in sips. She swept behind the counter even though nothing needed sweeping. She located the emergency numbers in a cracked plastic sleeve and memorized the order automatically: police, tow, Eddie’s cell. She refilled the receipt paper. She watched herself in the convex mirror above the candy and did not recognize the set of her mouth. She tried another sip of coffee and, when it tasted like hot cardboard, set it down and away like it might leap.

The lot stayed empty. The trees pressed their entirely reasonable silence against the windows. Somewhere far off, a transport truck carried its own weather down the highway. She let the hum of the coolers and the thin rattle of the light above aisle three braid into something like a soundtrack and then decided that was a dangerous thought and stopped it.

When the door opened next, it did so with a neat, satisfying ting, as if it had been auditioning.

Headlights had slashed the glass first this time, obvious as a promise. A car eased into a spot in front of the convenience-store window and idled. A couple climbed out. He wore a cap low. She held her purse in both hands as if it might bolt. They were laughing the way drunk people laugh when their bodies have been taught that quiet is expected and refuse to listen.

“Bathroom?” the man asked, steering the word with effort.

Rose pointed down the line of coolers. The bathrooms were designated with universally understood stick figures that Eddie had labeled GUYS and GALS with a Sharpie streak that went on too long. The couple didn’t slow, didn’t separate. They shouldered the Guys door and both went in, the woman with an apologetic glance over her shoulder that tried to be a smile and landed as a grimace.

Rose stared at the door after it clicked. She was not about to get in the middle of whatever that was. Out here, three a.m., no one within shouting distance: best to be a guardian of locks and cash and let living people govern their own bad decisions.

She straightened a stack of lottery slips that did not require straightening and counted to sixty twice. Her mind tried to show her images she didn’t ask for and she nudged them away. A low laugh leaked under the bathroom door, then the soft sound of a paper towel dispenser being yanked too far.

When they came out, they did so still laughing. The man added a muted “Thanks” in her direction that might have been for the bathroom or for her silence. The woman kept her eyes on the floor tiles and then out the window like she had to make sure the car remembered them. They tugged the door. The bell tinged. They crossed the glass. They got in. The headlights swung across the counter and the couple’s faces went white for a second like masks, and then the car rolled away and the lot fell back into itself.

Rose let out the breath she hadn’t noticed she was using for air and found the coffee again despite her earlier decision. One more sip. Her tongue complained, but the heat gave her spine a job.

She glanced up. 3:12 AM. The number looked set there for her. She did slow math. She’d arrived at 12:58, signed on, panicked, explored, hallucinated a door, maybe, upset a customer, located a warming drawer that might always have existed, and now it was a little after three. Two hours, give or take, depending on whether you trusted wall clocks or small digital fonts in corners of screens. She had until six. Maybe six-thirty if Eddie decided he liked sleeping late better than punctuality.

Her grandmother had insisted on a curfew like curfews mattered at sixteen the way they did at twelve. “You’re still my girl,” she’d said in the kitchen, teacup held with both trembling hands. “The world out there doesn’t know you yet.” Rose had kissed the top of her head and promised to text when she clocked out. She would. She’d text from the lot where the signal was better. She’d send a picture of the empty pumps with dawn staining the sky behind them and write See? Boring.

She leaned against the counter and let her gaze rest on the road beyond the lot, a ribbon of dark that occasionally reflected a private star when a distant vehicle’s light caught in the paint. The rhythm of the place was familiar already, the way unfamiliar places rush to pretend like home so you’ll stop flinching. Hums, clicks, the tiny stutter the register screen made when it auto-slept and woke. The smell of sugar, oil, hot plastic. Her own breath cooling as it left her mouth.

A moth tapped the fluorescent casing above aisle three—once, twice, a sound too soft to be real—but when she looked up there was nothing there. The casing itself shook a fraction, like a person adjusting themselves in the row ahead of you at a movie. She told herself she was done narrating events that could have duct tape as explanations.

She checked the CCTV one more time, more to prove to herself she could than because she wanted to. The parking lot lay in four camera quadrants like a board game. The timestamp rolled forward, then stuttered back a second, then corrected. In the top-right quadrant, where the glass cut a narrow triangle of reflection, she saw the suggestion of a shape near the door. Not a person. Not exactly. More like the memory of one—darker than its surroundings, patient. She stared until her eyes made static of the screen and then forced herself to blink. When she looked again, the triangle held only her reflection layered over the store’s aisles like she was both inside and out.

“Three hours,” she told herself, and in the saying it sounded like both a sentence and a promise.

She took the logbook again and wrote, in the margin where no one would look, Stay awake. Don’t make up stories. Then, right below it, she added, If you see something twice, it’s real. The second sentence scared her and anchored her in equal measure. She closed the book and slid it to the side.

The heating unit kicked on with a thump as if it had been listening for a cue. The air shifted from freezer to tolerable. She found the music button on the small radio under the counter and pressed it until static became a station. A retro track from somewhere between her grandmother’s era and her own spilled into the store at a respectful volume. It made the place feel manned. It made her feel like there were two of her: one to watch the door and one to watch the one watching the door.

Time began to behave. Or she stopped measuring it, which to clocks is the same thing. She counted bills, then recounted because she didn’t trust her fingers. She texted her grandmother a quick all good that she didn’t send, saving it as a draft instead. She memorized the emergency shutoff for the pumps, just in case a driver tore the hose away by accident. She pictured herself doing it calmly. She pictured herself doing everything calmly. In her mind she became the version of herself she wanted the world to meet on purpose.

Something thudded softly in the back room, a nothing sound that warehouse spaces make when temperature changes nudge boards in their nails. She didn’t go look. Not because she was afraid—though she was—but because it wasn’t necessary. She could live without the shape of every noise.

She cleaned a nonexistent smudge from the counter. She fought a yawn. She did the thing her father had taught her on long drives when her eyelids felt heavy: she named five things she could see, four she could feel, three she could hear, two she could smell, one she could taste. Open sign. Candy rack. CCTV monitor. My hand. The clock. Jacket cuff against my wrist. Floor edge under my shoe. The paper cup’s heat. Cooler hum. Light buzz. Radio breath. Diesel from the pumps. Coffee. Coffee. It helped. It always had.

When the bell finally tinged again, the sound was so perfectly tidy it felt like a trick of memory. She looked up and kept her expression flat. No one stood there; the door had not moved. She waited a count of five. Then ten. Then the radio caught a flicker of static and corrected itself, and if a voice had whispered very close to her ear in that space between static and song, she pretended it hadn’t.

“Okay,” she said, closing her hands around the edge of the counter until her fingers whitened and then released. “Okay.”

The clock told her 3:29 AM. She believed it. She believed the way the second hand jumped the way second hands do, even when she also remembered the camera showing her different jumps. She believed that her car would start at six-oh-seven if she asked it nicely. She believed hard in sunrise.

She glanced once more at the lot. At the heavy trees beyond it. At the strip of highway where an occasional semi carried its rectangle of light through the world for reasons that didn’t involve her at all.

For the first time all night, she let her shoulders ease, a quarter inch, as if putting down a bag at a bus stop you’ll pick up again in a minute. She sipped her coffee, winced, and kept her eyes on the door.

Time, suddenly, was kind. It moved the way it usually moves when you stop watching it. And Rose—tired, wired, and more awake than she’d been in months—waited for the sun to find her through the glass.