There’s a gas station on the edge of town
where shadows and memories make love on the fringes of sanity.
The cashier makes a mean ham and cheese sandwich.
She hands you the right brand of cigarettes every time,
as if she already knows which one you’ll choose.
People come for the sandwiches, but stay for the tug—
that itch behind the ribs that feels like a question
you were born trying to answer.
The first truth hooks you.
The second burrows in.
By the third, you forget what your own heartbeat sounds like.
A man once asked about the suit he didn’t own yet
and spilled whiskey on it that same night.
The stain wriggled into a small living thing,
whispering apologies on his behalf.
A woman learned her dog would dream of her long after she was gone.
After that, its shadow followed her in daylight,
lapping at her heels like a loyal second ghost.
A teen kissed a shadow at midnight
and woke in another city with fingerprints scorched into the wall—
marks he had never made, but recognized immediately.
A father heard his child would laugh, cry, and forget him
all in the same week.
Those echoes nested in his ribs,
tapping the bone whenever he tried to sleep.
And a man once tried to leave.
By nightfall, he carried a shadow of the cashier in his chest,
whispering every secret he would ever learn.
His reflection smiled back at him
with eyes almost, but not entirely, his own.
The bathroom is perennially broken.
Don’t ask.
And yet, when you flush, sometimes the water runs backward
and whispers a prophecy you didn’t know you were waiting for.