OVERSIZED LOAD
a new short story by Ron Arbuckle
OVERSIZED LOAD
Dead baby bird at the foot of the gas pump. Not a great way to start the day. It must have fallen from the nest. I don’t stare. I tell myself it’s respect for the dead, but the purple and red lump is an uncomfortable sight I’d rather not let linger in my memory.
I keep nodding off on the highway to the liquor store. The droning of the engine leads my body to betray me. As hard as I consciously try to stay focused on the road, my eyelids drift closed. I smack myself, hard, to stay awake. It still doesn’t work.
Cresting a hill. Nodding off.
I nearly get bulldozed by an oversized load. Oil field equipment hauled on a semi-trailer screaming by. Inches from my driver side window. Wide awake now. My body and mind effortlessly back in sync.
At the liquor store. The owner is in here to print paychecks. Ben’s here too. An old timer, he groans on about the same old issues. The front door that catches when it closes. The walk-in fridge being on the fritz. The delivery driver giving him a weird look. As always, he came in after his morning donut to grab his check. The owner scratches, scribbling her name five times hurriedly. I’m checking inventory on the computer. The three of us, creatures of habit, mindlessly locked into our routines. They’re both talking in hushed voices about a customer, Christian.
“Wait, did y’all just say Christian died?,” I ask, looking up from the computer as I try to piece together the fragments from their conversation.
They both shrug, nodding casually as if it’s hardly news that one of their long-time, consistent customers dropped dead.
I’m shocked. He was young. Makes sense why he never came in last weekend.
Always came in first thing during my shift. Always got a liter of gin. Never recognized me. I always took that personally. But he lived a vagrant lifestyle. Like a bird, flitting wherever the wind blows. The reality I preferred not to think about was that in his mind, I was just another hurdle between him and his next drink. He remembered Shirley. He remembered Ken. But compared to their decades working here, I was barely a blip on the calendar. Him not acknowledging me wasn’t personal. It can’t be when you’re locked into a sleepwalking existence between sips of gin. I’d shake it off. More customers to ring up. Bottles to bag. Check if they want a receipt. Restock the shelves as soon as the door shuts behind them.
Replacing the bottle in the vacant spot always felt like erasing the memory of him. Him stumbling in off the street, trying to be casual, but clearly itching to feel the slight crackle of the tamper-evident band unstitching from the plastic cap as he took his first long sip. Each morning he’d come in. Each morning he’d be erased. Like he’d never been there at all. Out of sight. Out of mind. A bottle of gin out. A bottle of gin back in.
One time he came in and looked like he’d got the snot kicked out of him; bruises all over his face, with a fat, split lip.
Maybe he was killed?, I wonder, trying to piece it all together.
“What happened?” I ask the others.
They tell me: accident, hospital, oversight in care, sobered up too much, too quickly. Sudden withdrawal killed him.
“He was pickled,” Ben jokes, “and you can’t unpickle a pickle.”
I don’t laugh.
Because a realization nearly knocks me over, like a house being dragged on the back of a semi-trailer nearly peeling off a pristine paint job at sixty-five miles per hour. Here I was droning along no differently. Clock in. Clock out. Replaced like the gin bottles by another face behind a register. Falling asleep at the wheel. Sleepwalking past faceless obstacles all the same. A ghost. A memory. Fading and fast.
The impulse to look away from something uncomfortable strikes me for the second time that day. This time I don’t. This time I leave the gin one slot empty. This time I don’t restock. This time I want to remember.
Ron Arbuckle lives in Oklahoma. He is the author of the novel, A Matter of Design. His writing is published or forthcoming in Expat Press, Blood+Honey, GONZOID, Trash Cat Lit, Citywide Lunch, APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, BULL, Hidden Peak Press, Plague Circus Press, Some Words & The Gorko Gazette.
You can find Ron on X: @touchgrass_ron
