The Child Who Knew My Shift

I worked the overnight register at a gas station off Highway 14, the kind of place where the coffee tastes like burnt wiring and every customer looks halfway between exhausted and dangerous. The boy first came in during sleet, wearing no coat and no shoes, leaving no footprints on the wet tile.

"What time do you get off?" he asked.

I told him I was calling the sheriff. He nodded politely, took a grape lollipop from the display, and walked out before I could reach the phone. Deputy Raines searched the pumps, the road shoulder, even the drainage ditch. Nobody found a child.

The next night at 3:11 a.m. he returned, hair still damp, lollipop still unwrapped in his hand.

"What time do you get off?" he asked again.

This kept happening for six nights. Always 3:11. Always the same question. Once I locked the doors at 3:00 and watched him appear on the other side of the glass anyway, not approaching from the lot but simply standing there as if the darkness had set him down.

Raines finally admitted a boy had drowned in the flood channel behind the station in 1998. He said the body had been carried two miles south before they found it, and that local people still talked about the pumps going dead on the anniversary.

I told him anniversaries do not open automatic doors.

On the seventh night, the boy looked past me instead of at me. "He's early," he said.

"Who is?"

The power failed. Freezers clicked silent. The station windows turned mirror-black. In the reflection behind me stood a man in a highway work jacket darkened to the elbows with water. His face was blurred the way faces blur in old photographs, but I could make out the shine of teeth.

The boy finally answered my original question. "The one who put me in the channel."

A hand settled on my shoulder from the darkness behind the counter, heavy and dripping cold through my uniform.

"You can go," the boy told me, stepping back toward the door. "He only comes for whoever closes alone."