by Gauri Binup
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
I. Smoke and mirrors.
Civ works at a convenience store.
The building was not a convenience store by birth. It used to be a small, remote retirement home, but after a particularly grueling scandal decades ago (she doesn’t know the specifics), operation funding evaporated almost overnight. The building was originally scheduled for demolition (this, Civ does know the specifics of: City Council had believed the site would house ghosts of the deceased), until an aspiring convenience store franchisee had seen potential in its location, adjacent to a newly-planned highway.
By now, Civ wouldn’t be surprised if the pseudo-entrepreneur had forgotten all about it. The convenience store, as it (barely) stood now, was long overdue for a renovation. She was quite sure that a pipe had begun sporadically leaking in recent months, but this was only the latest addition to her laundry list of concerns. The flooring would creak, the walls would groan, the shelves would shudder, and any number of similarly worn-out and overused personifications of the dilapidated place would apply.
It was the definition of an abandoned lot. Despite the new highway, no other companies had wanted to buy out the land nearby (maybe with respect to the aforementioned ghosts, who Civ suspected would drive property value down). The convenience store had become nothing more than an unexpected pit stop, a transitional space for truck drivers to pass through and fill up on gas.
Civ has worked the night shift for a long time now, and the wads of cash, fluctuating in thickness and left at random by her fickle manager, barely compensate for the hours she spends inhaling the smell of exhaust and forgetting the feel of daylight. However, the job gives her a space far away from her hometown, a place to think and be for herself, so she remains a loyal employee. Perhaps the loyal employee, seeing as she’d never had a coworker in all the time she’s been here.
Maybe others in her place, considering how lonely and desolate this state of affairs, would have aspired to bigger, better dreams by now, but as much as she has reason to complain, Civ tolerates the way things are. Simple, predictable.
She undertakes the daily slog even now. She bags one pack of cigarettes, two, three, none for her. It’s the ultimate act of service, really, she thinks, as she hands back a Veteran ID card.
“Hell’s the matter with you! Where’s the damn discount?”
“I just applied it, sir.”
“I’m supposed to get 20% off. I always have. I was here just last week at this exact time, young lady—”
He hadn’t been.
“—and I’ll have you know that the kind girl working that day even let me have a chocolate bar free.”
Civ doesn’t know what to say to this. The only kind girl within a fifty-mile radius is most certainly her.
“Free, I tell you! And you know what? She was respectful. So, so respectful. I just don’t see that in young people these days. No respect at all.”
He takes a breath here, and Civ takes the moment to put her broken record back on. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’ve already applied the discount. Maybe there was a sale that day.” There hadn’t been.
“It just can’t be that much! Don’t you have a supervisor around here? Someone who I can talk to?”
“No, sir, I’m the only one working tonight.” And every night, as it were.
“Well, that sounds about right anyway. Maybe if you had someone keeping an eye on you, you’d actually be a little more considerate.”
“Sorry, sir.”
Civ’s attempts at conflict resolution go ignored anyway, as the man goes on grumbling to himself and wrangling the collection (flock? murder?) of cigarette packs into one of his large coat pockets.
The doorbell rings, and the store buzzes with white, fluorescent emptiness.
Civ grabs one of the few bags of chips she’d smuggled behind the counter, drops it on the floor, and steps on it. Hard, so Civ can easily imagine the sound of bones splintering apart. Then comes the unfortunate byproduct of sublimation: air in the bag is expelled all at once, and sour cream and onion-flavored shards are scattered across the tile.
Civ sighs and takes this as a reason to finally sweep, and soon enough she’s weaving between shelves, gathering straw wrappers and vape cartridges in a dustpan.
Suddenly, there is a scuttling in the rafters. Civ, fearing the worst, grabs the ladder from the storage closet and the rodent repellant spray she’s always kept on standby as a kind of insurance, and climbs into the attic above the store.
There is a mattress, and a collection of bottles of yellow.
II. Liquid courage.
Civ realizes that she is not troubled. If anything, she’s relieved that the place wasn’t dealing with a plumbing issue after all.
In fact, maybe the amount of relief Civ feels is what should be troubling her. Because in the week since the incident, Civ has already found something very comforting, even revitalizing, about her new guest.
There is someone who knows when she clocks in and out, who knows just when to escape if she chooses to visit his space nestled in the rafters. He knows how deep her eyebags run by two o’clock in the morning, and how her customer service smile tucks them into neat little folds, crisp like plastic.
Plastic, plastic. She bags items with a giddy sort of eagerness, the kind she thought she’d lost to her first days on the job. In between customers, she twists and writhes and struggles not to peek at the ceiling, and her grinning face tucks itself bashfully into her shoulder.
She is the schoolgirl, and he, the forbidden lover, stowed away in a closet. Each visitor to the convenience store unwittingly assumes the role of mother, father, who’d surely disapprove of him, and Civ just can’t bring herself to look up and reveal the secret.
Admittedly, the convenience store was always her stage, but she used to perform only for that temporary audience which offers the grace of refreshing itself every night. Heckling sometimes, stale-faced other times. That, besides eating the expired stock, was the spice of life.
Now she finds herself in a different play altogether. Even her body language has been changing recently, though she doesn’t know why. He knew what she was like before she knew of him. Still, she’s more mindful of her posture: When to crouch to restock a shelf, and when to bend. When to exit stage left, when to turn to stage right.
In every movement, Civ wonders idly: What does he think of me now? And what about now?
After all, doesn’t he sit in the balcony for every rehearsal? Doesn’t he stick around for the whole performance cycle, watch her show every night? Doesn’t he know what it looks like when she delivers the same opener three days in a row—“Nice to step out and feel the breeze, huh?”—but inflects with slightly different phrasing each time?
If each customer sees her for whatever distinct plane she happens to offer that night, the man in the attic sees her for the sphere, that object of infinitely many sides.
One night, Civ sits next to the register, lazily sucking at cheap, stale beer. She’d found boxes of the stuff in the back, likely dropped off earlier that day in accordance with her manager’s whims. By the time she’s assembled a small tower of aluminum cans, she’s kicking her feet and giggling to herself. She’d have half a mind to invest in a rotary phone just to start twirling its cord, too, if the space weren’t already occupied by a syrupy fog.
She makes a game of arranging the cans in a triangular formation at one end of the counter, and totters off to retrieve a BuzzBall. She cackles as it rolls unevenly, knocking a measly two of the five over.
There’s not even any use in trying again. Considering the split, she wouldn’t even fetch a spare.
“Oh, bowling,” she huffs a breathy thing, recovering from a joke nobody had told, “I wonder if he likes bowling. Is that a good first date, bowling?”
Civ hadn’t been on any dates. Her hometown was small enough to induce claustrophobia, to the degree that entering a relationship with anyone from the generation of people she’d grown up with would feel vaguely incestuous. And
regardless, ever since she could conceive of life beyond the town, she’d been plotting how to leave: saving up for a car, packing her things, and driving endlessly until she could find refuge. After all, she didn’t much belong, there.
Not that truckers make for better company, here.
God, now her head’s flooding with water.
But isn’t there a solution to all her problems, only a few scant feet away?
And just like that, Civ’s head bobbles upward like a submerged buoy newly cresting over the surface, filled with nothing but air, drawn to nothing but air, and therefore incapable of drowning.
III. On solid ground.
Civ makes a habit of it after that night. Every few weeks, when her heart is fit to bursting, she clambers up the ladder and stops by the man’s humble abode.
At first she’d linger there, as though waiting for him to give up, tire of the cool night air, and come back home. She’d sit back on her haunches and look up to the hole in the roof, the window through which he always made his escape. She fashioned it a glamorous skylight in her mind’s eye, and basked in the glow it cast. She’d make space for herself on the mattress, cheeky, like a dog who knows she’d be reprimanded in the presence of her owner.
But upon months of this her fantasies grow richer, wilder.
After all, he was not returning to his most loyal pet. Perhaps he was waiting for something more than a mutt, a scruffy little thing which barely provides more than it leeches from the caregiver.
Yes, she understands it perfectly now. And isn’t this man so good at teaching her, without needing to say a word?
Civ, seeking to be in his good graces once more, deigns to become more than animal. Every now and again, she stockpiles enough from the store downstairs to make a meal. The first attempt is barely edible. So she makes another, another, another. But nobody returns home, and so the pile of anothers—all failures—grows higher, higher, higher.
An assortment of potato chips and mozzarella sticks melted with the power of microwave radiation over top, in a cruel imitation of nachos. A hodgepodge of fish, extricated from fridged sushi trays and forced to congeal into one, proper salmon-sized mass. An ice cream with more than just the one scoop mass-production allows for, where instead perfect globes are stacked to an impossible height, and stray, used up cones are tossed aside.
Each time, Civ precariously balances her newest handmade creation in one hand as she waits and waits centerstage under the skylight, in the spotlight. With the other, she combs greasy fingers through greasier hair, and pats down every misplaced wrinkle in her uniform apron, harder, still harder, as though the burning heat in her veins could iron it down.
She fancies herself the picturesque housewife, the kind who’d clap her hands at the sight of new pots and pans and a set of pink coat hangers and a twenty-dollar Yankee candle because the space could use some livening up and useless blocks of wood with trite little phrases like “It’s wine o’clock!” or “the kitchen is the heart of the home,” or bemoan good-humoredly at being unable to unscrew a jar lid and how her love was never home because, well, just think of the kids, when we have them, because of course we will, and what will they think when their father isn’t around for dance practice or talent shows, and maybe he’d stick around to treat them but he’d never really be there, you know, because family bonding isn’t a thing that can be bought and sold—
Civ’s head spins round and round like this, like a ballerina in a music box, caught in an eternal cycle of romance with demure upturned lips all the while. Never mind all the holes in the mobius paper strip which feeds into it infinitely, because all relationships come with the good times and the bad times, and the bad times are designed to make
her stronger, them stronger. He was really doing her a favor, she thinks, showing her how to kindle the hearth in her heart, and by extension the hearth of the home, their home, which they built together, where she held down the domestic front and he fought for them out in the great beyond, a place which would be much too scary for such a silly and petite girl like her, anyway.
The bell sounds downstairs.
It’s strange, because people don’t tend to enter the store at this hour. Civ thinks she should attempt to rouse herself, but she’s unable to move any of her limbs in the direction of the ladder. Now, Civ is that enlightened, fully-blossomed woman. She knows there are grander things that are more worthy of her time now than menial labor, like love.
But then, just when Civ resolves that she will stay in the attic, passively hoping that the customer downstairs will believe the store abandoned and leave, she hears a cacophony of footsteps. Multiple sets swarming together, with thick-soled boots pelting the tiled floor in a thunderstorm of noise.
With her familiarity of every item and its placement, Civ knows she hears the gummy snacks shelf being knocked over, the sound of single-serving cereal cups rolling and rolling, the metallic clang of the cash register being opened and overturned. There is also a cacophony of yelling, and Civ can’t piece any of it together:
“—just like what the report said!”
“—highly volatile and emotionally disturbed target—”
“My God, you’re saying all of this was—?”
What grips her attention is the yelling growing closer and closer, then the creak of the ladder.
Somebody is attempting to invade their home.
It’s all Civ can do to scream and wail. Surely her distress would echo out, and her lover would return to protect her.
But there is no protector. There is only the wooden paneling her face is shoved into, and then, because she is a well-trained homemaker, it is soon decorated with her tears and spittle.
Her wrists go cold.
SUPERIOR COURT OF [REDACTED]
COUNTY OF [REDACTED]
ARREST WARRANT
Criminal Arrest Warrant
Penal Code § 30-3
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF [REDACTED]
To any [REDACTED] peace officer.
Defendant’s Name: [REDACTED]
Order: A complaint on oath having been filed with this court on this date charging the defendant listed above with the crime(s) specified below, you are therefore commanded forthwith to arrest the above named defendant and bring him/her before me, or in case of my absence or inability to act, before the nearest and most accessible magistrate in this county.
Crimes Charged:
The defendant has been charged with the following crimes:
Theft by unlawful taking or disposition (Penal Code § 30-3): The Defendant did intentionally and knowingly acquire and exercise unlawful control over moveable property, with the intent to deprive the Complainants, “WELLS & CO. GENERAL STORE,” “QUICKMART,” and “MACLELLAN’S HOMEGOODS,” of said property, and without the effective consent of the Complainant. The value of said property is aggregate to an amount of more than $2,500 but less than $30,000.
● Note: Stolen property consists of standard convenience store wares, presumably for resale; food, beverages, alcohol, tobacco products, basic toiletries, over-the-counter medicines, everyday household products.
The Defendant did intentionally, knowingly, and without the effective consent of the owner, exercise unlawful control over property, to wit: United States Currency, valued at $6,768, with the intent to deprive the Complainants permanently of said property. Store managers, [REDACTED], reported cash register discrepancies over a record of several years [REDACTED]. Defendant’s identity confirmed with in-store CCTV footage.
Night Service Authorization [if checked]:
☑ Felony: This felony warrant may be executed at any hour of the day or night. ☐ Misdemeanor: Good cause for night service having been established in the declaration, this misdemeanor warrant may be executed at any hour of the day or night.
Bail:
☐ $ _____________
☑ No bail
Date and time warrant issued: [REDACTED] Judge of the Superior Court
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