The days went by and turned into weeks, and I fell into a new routine.
I kept a paper journal next to the cash register. Whenever something strange
happened, I'd make a note of it. After work, I'd swing by New Pages and
use my notes to update the blog. I was really taking to my new hobby, and I
even started to grow what might generously be considered a small fan base.
After the first couple weeks, I had amassed eleven whole followers!
Most of them were conspiracy theorists or "amateur paranormal
investigators," and only two of them were bots. As could be expected from
that crowd, they all used aliases, and I only knew them by their usernames.
But anonymous or not, it felt good to share my stories with people who
couldn't judge me to my face.
On the one-year anniversary of the half-pig incident, I wrote up a
blog entry detailing the whole story. I fully expected my followers to call
bullshit. After all, I'd told this story before. The first person besides myself
to learn that one half a pig had broken into the gas station was an out-of
towner named Cindy. She was notified while the creature was inside the
store, and she still expressed doubt.
"You mean, like a pig pig?"
She was the new girl in charge of answering phones at the sheriff's
station. (For some reason, the sheriff's department in our town has an
employee turnover rate that rivals the gas station, and most of our law
enforcement officials are brought in from neighboring communities.) It was
Cindy's first day, so I made a point to stay polite while the animal was
running amok, breaking things and screaming with the voice of an old
woman.
"Yes, that is correct."
"Are you yanking my crank?"
"No. This is not a joke."
"And you said, 'half'? Of a pig?"
"I said 'half of a pig.' An actual, literal pig. A swine hog."
"You serious?"
"As a heart attack."
"What do you mean by 'half,' exactly?"
"It's only the front half. And it seems very upset about the whole
thing."
"You mean, like, exactly half?"
"I don't know; I didn't measure it."
"Where'd the back half go?"
"Can you, maybe, like, send somebody out here?"
"And where did you say you were?"
"At the shitty gas station at the edge of town."
"Ohhh!" she exclaimed, "Please hold." Apparently, she had already
been warned about us, and she knew that the words "gas station" meant she
was supposed to put me through to Tom right away.
Good old Tom.
He was the deputy who drew the short straw all those years ago and
ended up on official "gas station duty." Back before his hair went all white
and his eyes turned permanently sad. He'd fielded enough of my calls by
then that all I had to say when he picked up the line was "It's half a pig. It
won't stop screaming, and I can't catch it." Then he grunted, muttered
something about that being "pretty freakin' weird," and drove out to help
me subdue the poor thing. Tom really was a good guy.
We asked around, but nobody knew where the half-pig had come
from or how the hell it got inside the store in the first place. Farmer Brown
(who was still alive at the time) came out to take a look and provide his
expert opinion. According to Farmer, the pig had somehow been "chopped
down the middle," but miraculously none of the important organs were hit.
Nothing supernatural about it, just really unusual.
Despite my expectations, the post didn't cost me any of my readers. In fact,
one of them invited me to a private group chat dedicated to discussions of
the paranormal.
I figured I might as well; it would be rude to turn down an invitation.
The chatroom was named "The Elm Street Irregulars." The host, according
to his profile, was a ninety-nine-year-old Call of Duty fan from Romania
with a picture of Squidward for his avatar. He called himself
Meowzlebub13. I popped in for an hour after work, and he introduced me to
a few of the "irregulars."
There was TinyDanza, who told me that he thought my blog was
hilarious. I didn't understand what he meant by that, but I thanked him
anyway. GundamSwing88 was the skeptic of the group. He read about the
pig incident and demanded "pics or it didn't happen," but my only
photographic evidence was on a stolen cell phone. Meowlzebub13 came to
my defense, insisting that "it's totally possible. There was a chicken that got
its head cut off and still lived for a couple months."
"Yeah," GundamSwing88 replied, "but a head is a lot less body mass
to lose than an entire bottom half."
He had a point. My only response was that I knew it must have been
possible because I watched it happen. But I guess that doesn't really prove
anything, does it?
"Could it have something to do with aliens?" asked SavageCardigan,
but nobody answered him.
BobbleHeadInTheButt4 wanted to know what we did with the pig
after.
I told him that it stayed in a pen at the local elementary school for a
few months like some kind of morbid mascot until a scientist and his team
from somewhere up north offered the school a thousand dollars to let them
take it. (For science, I suppose.) After it left, nobody talked about it. Almost
like it never happened in the first place.
That was a recurring theme at the gas station. Anytime something
especially weird happened, there was always a nice and neat "official
explanation," followed by a tacit agreement from everyone involved to
never speak of it again.
And here I was, violating that unspoken rule, blissfully unaware of
the consequences.
***
It was a cold October night the first time I saw the man in the blue
raincoat. He almost didn't register on my radar because when he showed up
I was fairly distracted.
I was running a "buy one get one free" special on lawn gnomes,
where if you buy one of anything in the gas station, you get a free lawn
gnome if you want it (still very few takers). I'd wrangled them all and taken
count. Forty-seven gnomes made up the display. I slapped a "$5.99 ea"
price tag across the top of the old stickers on each of their foreheads and
decided to call it done for now, before returning to my seat behind the
counter. That's when I noticed that one of the cultists had yet again left a
stack of brochures for their "organization" right next to the cash register.
I know this might be an unpopular opinion, but I don't really care for
cults.
And as far as cults go, I really didn't care for this one.
They usually weren't much of a bother. The cultists (they hated it
when I called them cultists) tended to stay in their compound (they hated it
when I called it a compound) a few miles deeper into the woods. I could
respect that. I've always tried to give others their privacy whenever they
allow me mine, and whatever they were up to out there was absolutely none
of my business.
So why did I have such strong feelings for this cult?
Mostly because of crap like this. The brochures on my counter. The
cold-recruiting. The awkward "Do you have a moment to talk about
something that will change your life forever?" No, dude, I'm working at a
shitty gas station in the middle of nowhere and I'm perfectly happy being
miserable until I die. Good day, sir.
Really, it wasn't about the cult. It was that one cultist. The one who
didn't understand the rules. The one who was constantly trying to get me to
follow him back to the compound. The one who reacted to rejection much
the same way as a confused puppy. I had taken to calling this one Marlboro.
(I'll let you guess why.)
I scanned the room to see if he was still around, and sure enough,
there he was: a shaggy looking dirty blonde a few years older than me,
bursting at the seams with dopey smiles and euphoric energy.
When I spotted him, he was busy chatting up the annoyed redhead
standing in line for the bathroom. Even if he hadn't already come into the
gas station a hundred times before, I would have recognized him as a cultist
from the dress code alone: a plain white button-up with khaki pants. As
always, he was technically in uniform, although his pants were covered in
grass stains, his shirt was untucked, and his top three buttons were either
undone or missing.
After she shot him down, the cultist turned his attention to his favorite
target. Me. He approached my counter, with his recruitment pitch loaded up
and ready to go, once again inviting me to take a small leap of faith and quit
my job and follow him back to the compound where sublime transcendence
and pancakes awaited. I told him I wasn't interested and then slowly, very
slowly, I pushed the entire stack of cultist pamphlets across the counter, off
the edge, and into the wastebasket, maintaining eye contact with him the
entire time.
He shrugged it off and asked me for a pack of Marlboros, then handed
me a black American Express card with the name "Dianne Zhao" written
across the front. The machine accepted the payment and spit out a receipt,
so I wrote it off as another not my problem, handed him his coffin nails, and
sent him on his way.
I lost track of time after that.
It's easy to do on boring days, where mindless repetition turns the
hours into a potage of ceremonial motions and anodyne interactions. In my
experience, even solid memories will melt away or fuse together without
some kind of reference point.
Don't get me wrong. I like it. I take comfort in the relaxing familiarity
of monotony. But there's an entire ocean between these small islands of
worthwhile moments, and little survives the trip intact. An upset customer
here. A surprise raccoon attack there. And in between, who really knows? It
might have been an hour or two or four later. But at some point, Farmer
Junior came into the store looking for me.
I already knew what he wanted, and I was already tired of dealing
with it.
"So?" he said.
"I told you already. The hand plants are gone."
"Gone? For how long?"
"Forever, I would assume."
He scribbled his phone number onto the back of a coupon he had
tucked into his wallet for twenty-percent off bulk pig feed from an online
retailer and told me to call him if anything were to change. I was pretty sure
that he was trying to send me a message.
Farmer stormed out in a huff, leaving me to my solitude, but before I
could settle back into my book
Scritch, Scritch, Scriiitch...
There came a strange, soft, unsteady scratching from the other side of
the ceiling tiles overhead, and the only thing I could think was how bad it
would be if Rocco and his brood had found a way into the building again.
The next thing I remember is standing outside in a small hole with a
shovel in my hands.
***
It had been a while since the last episode, and part of me thought, or
hoped, that maybe the problem had somehow fixed itself. But deep down, I
knew it was just a matter of time before I caught myself digging again.
Sometimes, on slow nights, I surrender to the ocean of moments and I
let myself drift away. Don't ask me where, because I honestly don't know.
Just like I don't know who or what is controlling my body while I'm gone.
Maybe my body has a mind of its own. And if that's the case, I have to
wonder if my body even needs me at all anymore.
I've done those things enough times in mental autopilot that my body
figured out how to do them without me. I stocked the cigarettes, rotated the
frozen drink machine, scraped the mold off the bottoms of the ice buckets,
emptied the rat traps, and somewhere along the way, my body bypassed my
brain and found a shovel, went out back, and started digging a hole.
Actually, I shouldn't say my body "started" digging. I'd been
subconsciously digging this hole, off and on, for several months. Usually,
I'd come to after only a few shovel loads. But this time was different. This
time I added another foot and a half to the hole's depth before I snapped
back to reality, looked around, and asked myself, "What the hell am I
doing?"
I climbed out, put the shovel away, washed my hands, and went back
to the front of the store. That's when I first saw him, standing outside past
the gas pumps, just beyond the reach of our store lights, dangerously close
to the road. A man in a dark blue raincoat. I watched him for a while. Thirty
seconds. A minute, maybe. But he never moved. He just stood there, stoic
and still, facing the gas station. I couldn't tell if he was staring at me, or if
he was staring past the building at the trees on the other side.
Whatever the man in the raincoat was doing out there, he wasn't
bothering anybody. And besides, there was a lawn gnome sitting on the
counter without a price tag on it. So I left the man in the blue raincoat alone
and put the newest lawn gnome with his brethren. Then I went back to my
seat and continued my book until sunrise, stopping every now and then to
look up at the ceiling whenever I thought I heard scratching overhead.
***
I thought about mentioning the man in the raincoat in my next blog
update, but a couple of my readers wanted to know what the deal was with
the lawn gnomes. So I wrote up a brief history.
Every now and then, for as long as I've been working here, I'll find a
lawn gnome hidden inside the gas station. It's just another peculiarity that
I've learned to deal with. The first time I found a gnome, it was buried
inside a display of pork rinds. I didn't think too much of it at the time and
put him in the lost and found box behind the counter. But a few days later, I
found another matching lawn gnome stuffed inside the drink case. I
assumed some kids were probably playing a weird trick on me, and I moved
him to the box with the other.
It wasn't until a couple of weeks later, when the next pair of gnomes
popped up, that I started to suspect something was going on. I was out back,
taking a bag of garbage to the dumpster when I found them, perched atop a
tree branch nearby and staring down at me like impish gargoyles. I got a
broom and step ladder to knock them off, then put them into the box with
the other three.
I quickly realized that I needed a more permanent fix, as the lost and
found box was already full and the gnome arrivals showed no signs of
stopping. A gnome showed up on top of the busted gas pump, and I stuck
him in the supply closet behind the cleaning sprays. A gnome ended up
inside the bagged ice cooler outside, and I put him in the drawer with my
receipt papers. A couple gnomes showed up right outside the back door, and
I left them where I found them because one of them was holding a steak
knife and I don't need that kind of crazy in my life.
Eventually, I decided to put price tag stickers on them and move them
onto their own display near the front doors. Ever since then, the gas station
has sold lawn gnomes for $9.99 each, or best offer.
On average, I'll come across another gnome once every week or two.
Sometimes, we'll go a whole month without seeing one. But they turn up
more frequently just before a huge storm. Back in August, we had five
gnomes across the ten days leading up to the tornado that set down nearby
and killed three people.
At one point, I got lucky and sold an entire pallet of them to a man in
a truck, but a few hours later he returned them all. He didn't even ask for a
refund or anything; he just dropped the pallet by the front doors and sped
off without saying a word.
Meowzlebub13 called together another group chat. Apparently, the
gnomes really struck a nerve with the irregulars. WendigoHunter69
believed they were part of some complex surveillance operation from either
the government or the shadow government, and insisted that I stop
distributing them because I was doing exactly what they wanted. TinyDanza
agreed with WendigoHunter69. SavageCardigan blamed aliens, but he
always did that so it was hard to take him seriously. MrCatMan23
recommended I follow a suspicious looking link that almost certainly would
have downloaded malware to Brother Riley's computer before
Meowzlebub13 banished him with a battle cry of "Be gone, spam bot!" And
ScaredMoose asked me if I had ever heard of Moth Men.
As ScaredMoose put it, Moth Men were omens of folklore, and their
sightings almost always announced an oncoming catastrophe.
I'm not saying that the lawn gnomes are omens or anything like that.
I'm just saying some part of me was noticing with growing concern that
nearly a dozen gnomes had popped up in only the last five days.