"Convenience Store"

(This story contains cursing) Look, I work nights at a convenience store. I’ve seen some stuff. Tonight, though, is seriously making me want to quit. I’m hiding away in the break room trying to figure out how to write this incident report without sounding insane, and or under the influence. I’ve dealt with the homeless, the tweakers, the shoplifters, and I’ve been robbed, twice! Right now though, I’m about to get fired because of one, little screwup! Just one!

I was standing at the register, scanning a customer’s drink when I heard our front doorbell ring. A kid wearing some skater gear and a backpack walked in and made a beeline for the drinks section in the back, his blonde hair glistening under the fluorescent lights. I watched him while I finished ringing up the young lady, and waited for her to leave before I confronted the kid. We have a “No Backpacks” policy that I am happy to implement. I jogged to the back, walkie in hand. He had opened up our drinks cooler and was grabbing cans of energy drinks, shoving them in two at a time in his back pack.

“Hey, hey”, I called out as I reached out to grab him, “you need to pay for those!” He froze for just a second before snatching his bag up and shrugging it on. I lunge again and my foot catches on a drink and I faceplant next to him with a yelp. He sprints past me, laughing. His laugh was kind of weird, distorted, like it wasn’t really coming from him. For about a half a second a chill went down my spine, but it was replaced with the unbridled rage of being mocked when I scrambled up and saw that he was at the register, doubled over laughing so hard it almost sounded like a sob, and he finally says something in that weird little voice of his.

“You’re not very nice.”

“You’re stealing!”

“What if I was going to pay?” He tilts his head to the side and pulls out a wad of crumpled, wet one dollar bills and places it on the register. He isn’t laughing anymore, but I wish he was, because his face was empty like a corpse without it, the eyes dull with no shine like a scleral lens an actor might wear, giving them the appearance of dilated pupils. He walks out of the store backwards. I went back to the register, wincing with each step. There was exactly six dollars and sixty-six cents. I have no idea where the change came from. I counted again, biting my lip. My boss wasn’t going to like this. He stole way more than this amount, and I’m not even supposed to confront shoplifters. I pinch my nose and go to the front. I’ll sacrifice some break time to clean up real quick, stock some cans, maybe look at the ankle I damn neared twisted. I lock the door, clock out, and go to the back.

My left ankle’s throbbing. I grab an ice pack from the freezer and sit in our old beat up lounge chair. I hate working by myself. The walkie is useless because my boss is never paying attention, so I’m alone, alone right now. I ice my ankle for about five minutes before going back to the floor. Phones are prohibited, so mine is tucked away in my work locker for right now. There were some extra cans of energy drinks, so I stock up as much as I can during the rest of my break. I walk back to throw the box away when I hear the door’s bell ring like it always does when it's opened. I yelp and run to the back, closing the door behind me. I LOCKED it. I even checked. No way. No freaking way. I gasped as I retrieved my phone, clutching it to my chest for a moment almost like a hug. I slid down the wall, hands shaking. I’m still not getting over being robbed six months ago. But at least the dude was kinda polite. I didn’t like this kid with his dead-fish-eyes. I knew it was him deep down, but I did not want to go out there. He was tricky, and he picked the lock, so what else could he have with him? A knife? A gun?

All of that aside, I force myself up, holding my phone and reaching back into my locker. I have pepper spray that I shove into my pocket while I silence my alarm and clock in. A text flashes above the screen in a blue bubble:

Mr.Boss: Where are you? I don’t see you on the floor or on the register?

Me: I was on break, I am going back up right now.

I didn’t mention the theft, not yet. I wanted to write a decent report first.

He doesn’t text back, so I suck in a breath of air and walk towards the break room door, with its little window. I was right. It was him, walking through the snack aisle. He’s still dripping water all over the floor, and my fist clenches. I know the weather’s been bad these past few days, but this kid is ridiculous. I walk out with my phone and pepper spray in my pocket, along with a mop and bucket. There was some cleaning to be done. His back’s to me, and he’s currently emptying the entire contents of a bag of chips in his mouth. He was eating fast, grabbing snacks and tearing them open. He didn’t hear me come up behind him and shove him, hard, away from the snacks and onto the floor. I hold the broom between me and him like a spear, while I pull out my pepper spray and aim it right at him.

The blonde kid, who couldn’t have been older than seventeen, pushed himself up on his skinny arms and looked up at me with those dead-fish-eyes that made me clench my jaw a bit as I spoke.

“How did you get in?” He gave me another smile, this one a little too big for his face.

“The door.” I noticed he didn’t have his bag this time, and now that I’m looking at him better, he looked like he could’ve been homeless. His hair was dirty, greasy, and I could’ve sworn there was a feather in there, a literal bird’s nest. The boss was going to kill me if I let an ingrate get in here.

“I locked it. You stole once”, I said as I lightly prodded him in the chest with the mop, “and then you waited until I went to the back to break in and steal some more. What do you think the police will think when they get here? This whole place is being recorded.” He didn’t really react, just slowly blinking and looking down at the mop pushing his chest.

“I was hungry. I didn’t break your door.” He was staring at me now.

“You get money and you pay like everyone else! Get up, get up, right now!” I reach down and haul him up by one skinny pale arm, dragging him with me to the break area, where I could lock him in and hold the brat while I call the cops. The kid yelps, twists back, and screams something in a tongue that makes my entire body freeze up. It sounded old, and European? It made me let go, and now I was twisting back, because standing in front of me wasn’t a scrawny street rat.

It was a bear. Not black bear, not a brown bear, but a fucking polar bear. The big, dark eyes suddenly make a lot of sense. It rears up like in National Geographic, and I scream swinging the mop at it while backing away. I get to the front door and try to shove it open with my shoulder, only for it not to budge. The bear snorted at me, his head shaking side to side, and I knew that it was laughing at me, and that I was about to be that kid’s next meal. The bear roars and lunges, and I roll to the side and try to run to the drinks aisle, where I could maybe go into the walk-in beer cooler.

UMPH!

The bear squashes me against the floor, his hot breath and saliva dripping onto the side of my face. I squeak and piss my pants at once, and the bear chuffs again.

“I’m sorry!” I squealed as I felt him press down on my back.

“I’ll let you have what you want!” The bear snarls.

“I have food! I have chips and candy and I’ll even let you have a slushie!”

The bear pauses for a second and then gets off me. It shoves at me with one giant paw as if to say go ahead as it went back to staring at me, panting a little. I understood immediately, and scrambled down the aisle to get what I promised him. I feel the black eyes staring at me as I make him forty ounce cola slush, grab him more chips, candy, and even another energy drink. I go back and lay them out in front of the bear. He sits there for a second before letting another roar, except maybe this could’ve been more of a scream. Then his body twists, contorts, shrinks, and turns back into a stupid blonde teenager. He was hugging himself now, and his hair had gone a stark, pale blonde, almost white like the polar bear’s.

Sitting here now, after all of this, in hindsight, I should’ve known that I was seeing something I wasn’t supposed to, something unnatural.

“Are you the Devil?” I asked as I watched him chow down again.

He doesn’t look up, just shrugs as he slurps his slushie.

“You people call me that, but I have a lot of names.” Finally, he gets up, slushie in hand, his ill gotten gains tossed about him. He gives me another gigantic smile.

“But my people, they call me Loki.” He laughs, and laughs right out of the store. My boss is pissed. But me? I think I’m gonna quit this job as soon as I finish this report…