Cold Storage

Cold Storage

Trigger warning: This story contains themes of grief, trauma, and the death of a friend.

Cold Storage

I worked the graveyard shift at Della's Diner long enough to know when a night was going to get strange. The storm had already announced its intentions, rattling the windows while the salt shaker shivered its way across the table.

"Absolutely not," I muttered, pinning it with my hand.

"You know most people would call the manager if the silverware started migrating," Jess said behind me.

I turned. She leaned against the pie fridge, the fading light faintly blurred around her, hair in the same messy bun she wore during every shift.

"You need better hobbies," I said.

Jess laughed—that dry, sharp sound that always made me feel like I'd missed something obvious. "Bad night?"

"They're all bad nights."

"You hear it tonight, don't you. The freezer."

"I don't hear anything."

"You just pretend you don't."

Before I could answer, the diner door chimed and Lena stumbled in, soaked and exhausted.

"Please tell me you have coffee."

"We always have coffee.”

“Sometimes it even tastes like it,” Jess mused.

Lena managed a weak laugh and slid into a booth. I poured her a cup and set it down.

"You're gonna ignore me now," Jess said.

"That's the plan," I retorted.

Lena wrapped her hands around the mug, thawing slowly. "Every time I come in here, it's you."

"You caught me on a busy decade."

She smiled, small and grateful. I took her order and worked the grill while Jess lingered near the shelves, always glancing toward the freezer door. I tried to focus on the food, not my ex-best friend hovering at my shoulder.

Lena ate quickly and tipped well. "Be safe tonight," she said before hurrying back into the rain.

After she left, the diner fell into a deeper quiet than before. Even the freezer hum sounded sharper in the silence. I checked the clock above the counter out of habit. The second hand twitched once, then stalled, frozen at an angle like it had forgotten its purpose.

Jess stood by the hallway now. She kept her eyes on the freezer door. The emergency lights flickered overhead. I felt the building tilt slightly—or maybe that was just my nerves pulling tight.

"You know what's coming," she said.

"I know the power grid in this town is held together by duct tape and regret."

She smiled softly. "You always joke when you're scared."

Jess looked at me the way she used to look at me on the line when she knew I was lying about something small, like taking her turn to restock the lettuce. She'd always been able to see through me.

The lights flickered twice, then went out. The diner sank into darkness broken only by the red glow of the emergency exit sign. I took a step back, my heart jolting at the sudden stillness. A cold draft slid along the floor, brushing my ankle. Jess stood very still in the red light, more defined than she'd been all night.

"It is time, Nina."

"I can't," I whispered.

"You can. And you don't have to do it alone."

A soft tapping came from the back. Once. Then again. Slow. Patient.

My throat tightened. I grabbed the flashlight and followed Jess down the hallway. The shadows pooled along the walls, stretching toward the freezer door.

"This is the night," she said. "The one you've been avoiding."

The tapping stopped. The silence that followed felt alive.

"Open it."

I hesitated, gripping the handle. "I—I'm afraid."

"I know," she said gently.

The handle twitched under my fingers. I forced myself to pull. Frosted air burst out, bitterly cold. Jess stood inside near the back wall, more deliberate than she'd been in months.

"Come in."

"I can't go in there."

"You already are."

I stepped inside. The cold wrapped around me like a memory. Shelves, crates, the far wall—all exactly as I'd seen them every night since she died.

"Say it," Jess said.

"I don't know what you want."

"You do."

The truth pressed up from the floor, rising into my chest.

And I finally let it.

I'd rehearsed a dozen versions of this moment in my head without ever letting the words get close to my mouth.

Jess watched me without speaking. The freezer hummed faintly around us, a mechanical pulse under the storm outside.

"I told you to grab the box of fries from the back," I went on. "You rolled your eyes, like always, and said if you froze to death I had to take your Saturday shifts. I said I'd be honored." I let out a short, humorless laugh. "We thought we were clever."

"You were," Jess said quietly. "We were very funny."

"I watched you walk down this hallway," I said. "And I told myself you were fine."

"You'd never seen me not be fine," Jess said. "That matters."

"It doesn't change what happened." My hand shook around the flashlight. I lowered it, letting the emergency light paint the room in red instead of stark white. "I don't know how long I let you stay in here. When they asked me, I picked numbers that sounded reasonable. Ten minutes. Fifteen. I don't know. Time shrank. Time disappeared. I only know that when I finally opened the door, you were on the floor and you weren't breathing and everything that felt tired and normal about this place turned into a horror movie in one second."

The words felt like glass coming out of me. My chest hurt.

"I should have checked sooner," I finished. "That's the truth."

Jess shook her head gently. "That is a truth. Not the one you've been choking on."

"It's the important one."

"It's the one you use to stop yourself from going deeper," she said. She took a step closer. The cold around me thickened. "I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm saying it's not the whole story. The whole story is heavier, and not all of it belongs to you."

I looked at the back wall. There was no visible mark where I found her. There never had been, not really. The stain I saw there every night belonged entirely to me.

"I left you alone," I whispered.

"You always left me alone in here," she reminded me. "We both complained about it. We both made jokes about it. We both ignored safety videos. You're not the only variable in the equation."

"That sounds like something the restaurant's lawyer said," I muttered.

"Maybe they were right by accident," Jess said. "You're allowed to be wrong in ways that aren't criminal."

I shook my head. "If I'd come sooner—"

"If you'd come sooner," she finished, "you might've bought me a few more moments. Maybe enough, maybe not. You don't know. That not knowing is the part you can't stand. So you rewrite it. You decide it would definitely have saved me. You put the entire weight on that. On you. Because if it's entirely your fault, at least you can pretend the universe isn't random and cruel. You trade a god of chaos for a god of self-blame. It feels like control."

My eyes stung. I blinked, but the tears still came. They froze almost instantly on my lashes.

"Don't do this," I said.

"You asked me to the night I died," Jess replied. "You grabbed my hand and said, 'Tell me this was my fault.' You don't remember saying that, but I do."

I swallowed hard. My stomach turned over. "I don't want it to be your fault."

"It wasn't only mine," she said. "Or Gloria's. Or the cheap latch. Or the storm. It was a hundred small terrible decisions and accidents that lined up just wrong. You were one piece of it. I was another. The owner who wouldn't pay for a new freezer was a third. The health inspector who never came back was a fourth. You aren't large enough to swallow all of it."

"They let me keep my job," I said. The words tumbled out in a rush. "I thought that meant it wasn’t my fault, that I was supposed to move on."

Jess studied my face for a long moment. Her expression shifted from pity to something almost like exasperated fondness.

"You stayed," she said, "because you thought watching the door would keep it from happening again."

"Yes."

"You stayed," she added, "because you didn't know where else you could go and still feel close to me."

That took the breath out of me. I'd never said that part aloud. Not to anyone.

"I couldn't leave you here alone," I admitted.

"You didn't," she said. "I was never in this freezer once they took me away. You were. Every night. You crawled in here and replayed it. You froze yourself in place because you thought that if you stayed stuck, I wouldn't be gone."

The hum of the compressor buzzed faintly along the walls. My fingers had gone numb. The red light flickered.

"What if I let go," I asked. "What if I stop replaying it and it really is just… over?"

"It's been over for a long time," she said. "You're the one who keeps hitting rewind."

I laughed weakly, the sound fogging the cold air. "Is this what the afterlife is? Ghosts dragging people into freezers to talk about their feelings?"

Jess smiled, and in that moment she looked so much like the woman I worked beside that my chest ached.

"If it helps," she said, "this is probably only the afterlife for you."

"You're not staying?"

"No." Her smile softened. "That's the good news."

I felt panic spike. "I'm not ready for you to go."

"I didn't say you'd feel ready," she said. "I said you are."

"How do you know that?"

"Because you came in here," she said. "On your own. With the lights out and the power gone and no one else around. You brought the truth in here with you this time instead of leaving it at the table."

I stared at her. "I don't know what to do without you haunting me."

"You'll figure it out," she said. "You're annoyingly resilient."

The freezer light sputtered again. Jess's edges started to lose definition. I reached out instinctively. My hand passed through her arm. It felt like dipping my fingers into carbonated water, tingling and empty all at once.

"I'm sorry," I said. The words finally came clean. "I'm so sorry I didn't come sooner. I'm sorry we made jokes instead of fixing things. I'm sorry about all of it. I miss you."

"I know," she said. "I believe you. I forgive you."

"That's not how this works."

"It's exactly how this works," she replied. "You wanted a haunting. Congratulations. You got an intervention instead."

Her smile turned wry. "And for the record, I'm also sorry I left you alone with Gloria longer than necessary. This isn't a one-sided apology tour."

The lump in my throat thickened, but the tightness in my chest eased, just slightly.

"Tell her," Jess added. "Tell Gloria some version of this. She carries her own ghosts."

I remembered the way Gloria avoided looking at the freezer whenever she came into the kitchen. How she double-checked the latch but never touched it with her bare hand. How she snapped at me the one time I joked about getting locked in.

"I don't think she wants to talk about it," I said.

"She doesn't," Jess agreed. "You didn't either. Until you did."

The light flared once. Jess's form brightened, then thinned to almost nothing. For the first time that night, I felt more warmth than cold in the room.

"Jess," I said. I didn't know how to form the question I wanted to ask.

She seemed to understand anyway. "I don't know what comes next," she said. "But I'm ready to find out. You should be too."

"I am not dead," I said.

"Exactly," she replied. "Act like it."

She began to fade then, not like smoke, but like light at the end of a long night. Her features grew indistinct. The freezer felt less crowded. My shoulders dropped without my permission.

"One more thing," she said, her voice now barely more than a vibration in the air. "You're better at hash browns than you think you are."

A laugh broke out of me, sharp and wet. "You're a terrible liar."

"I learned from the best," she said.

And then she was gone.

The hum of the freezer filled the space where she'd been. My breath came in shuddering pulls. I stepped backward until I hit the door and then out into the hallway. The warmth of the diner air felt almost oppressive after the chill.

The power came back on with a low electrical sigh. Fluorescent lights blinked awake, humming their familiar off-key song. The radio crackled back to life. I stood there for a moment.

I reached down and slid the bright yellow door wedge under the freezer door, pressing it firmly into place. It had been there all along, part of the regulations we both used to ignore. Tonight I gave it my full attention.

Gloria stuck her head out of the office, her headset askew. Her gaze went straight to the freezer.

"I still have the incident report," she said. "HR told me I could throw it away, but I didn't."

A year of unsaid words hovered between us.

"I went in there," I said. "Said some things I should've said a long time ago."

Gloria swallowed. "To her?"

"To myself," I said.

She looked at the freezer, then at me. "You're still here."

"So are you."

A fragile smile flickered across her face. "I should've made them replace that door years ago. I still dream about that night."

"I know," I said.

We stood quietly for a moment before she cleared her throat.

"There's a notebook in the lost and found," she said. "Take it."

I thought of the battered spiral in my booth. "I have one."

"Get a new one. Sometimes you can't keep writing in the old one."

She retreated into her office.

I walked back to my booth. My notebook waited on the table. I flipped past the pages where I'd started stories about anything except the night Jess died and found a blank sheet.

Instead of "It was a dark and stormy night," I wrote the sentence that had formed in the freezer:

The night Jess died, the freezer door stuck. I told myself it was just the building settling.

I let the words sit, then added:

For months afterward, I pretended the only thing trapped in there was her.

The story came slowly but steadily. I wrote what I could bear to look at.

I glanced toward the stool where Jess had leaned earlier. Empty. No shimmer. No smirk. No salt shaker creeping toward chaos.

The quiet didn't feel like accusation anymore. It felt like space.

A little while later, the bell over the door jingled and two nurses walked in, their scrubs damp, faces lined with a familiar exhaustion.

"Coffee?" I asked.

"Strong enough to raise the dead."

I poured their cups. The joke didn't cut the way I expected.

The storm softened to a steady rain. Somewhere behind the clouds, the sky was beginning to lighten.

Between refills, I went back to my notebook. The words didn't fight me the way they used to.

People say everything gets quiet after dark, I wrote. They're wrong. The ghosts get louder. If you listen long enough, some of them are only trying to tell you the story you've refused to write.

I didn't know if anyone would ever read it. For the first time, that was enough reason to keep going.

When the nurses left, I looked around the empty diner—the booths, the counter stools, the hallway to the freezer.

The ache was still there. Maybe always would be. But the weight had shifted, settled into different places instead of only on my chest.

Outside, the sky had turned the color of old bruises, a thin band of gray growing at the horizon. Morning was coming, whether the clock acknowledged it or not.

I poured myself one last cup of coffee and slid into my booth. My notebook waited. The diner hummed softly around me, no longer a tomb or a shrine, but simply a place where I worked and, sometimes, told the truth.

I didn't feel trapped in the graveyard shift.

I was just working it.