Liam leaned on the counter as he watched the clock roll slowly toward ten. This had become a nightly ritual since his second day on the job. He watched the clock and reenacted all the events in his life that led him to being the closing clerk at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. It hadn't meant to work out like that, of course. Liam had started to wonder if anyone's life ever worked out the way it was meant to. He thought not.
He was meant to move to Los Angeles. Liam didn't have much luck with college, but he did somehow manage to find Sarah. They'd dated for a year before she moved to L.A. and left him behind. As his own prospects started drying up, they discussed the idea of moving in together. Liam packed up his small collection of belongings and hit the road, ready to take the plunge with Sarah. Halfway across the country, Sarah changed her mind. She changed it so thoroughly that she advised Liam to turn back. She didn't know why she'd agreed in the first place. They'd changed too much while they were apart. She was seeing someone else, someone who would help her career. Liam had listened to her prattling on the phone while numbness crept through him.
It wasn't the loss of Sarah that made him feel confined. It was the loss of direction. Growing up, he'd wondered how people wound up going nowhere in their lives. But then, on his way back to his small home town, Liam understood. His parents were gone. He'd never made many friends. Those he did had moved on with their lives. He had no job, no schooling, and no real ambition. All his possessions fit in a twelve year old Honda. He had his inherited childhood home and about three grand in the bank. While Sarah's voice on the phone explained the fundamental difference between Liam's aura and her own, he'd made his peace with becoming another bug stuck in the flypaper of small town America. Silverton was as good a place as any, he figured. It hadn't been a bad place to live for his first eighteen years. No reason it shouldn't be fine for the back sixty. The local shop had a help wanted sign waiting for him when he got back to town, the perfect place for him to be miserable.
The bell above the door rang, and Liam sighed. No one passed this way except for the people who lived in Silverton. Those people should know by now that the shop closes at 10:00, but that rarely stopped them from coming in with five minutes left on the clock to ensure Liam had to suffer to the very last moment. Liam looked from the clock to the man brushing snow off his shoulders. Not a local after all, at least not one Liam had seen since he'd been back.
The man looked like a body builder stuffed into a red sweater and green slacks. He had a close cut white beard and curly white hair that rolled down to his shoulders. The red in his face worried Liam. The last thing he wanted was a belligerent drunk demanding another sixer of beer. Not to mention the drunk driving worry, but Liam hadn't seen a car or heard a motorcycle in the lot. He didn't know how the man could walk to the shop in the pitch black, snowy evening, but as long as he didn't actually see the man trying to drive there wasn't much he could do. Liam straitened up to watch him, silently hoping the man would turn around and leave quickly.
Instead of beer, the man went to the candy aisle. He gathered as much as he could carry, brought it over, and dropped the armful of sugary sweets on the counter. "Oo! Candy canes, my favorite," the man said as he noticed the display beside the counter. He gather six boxes and added them to the pile.
Stoned out of his mind,
Liam thought as he started ringing up the different baggies of gummies, sweet tarts, and a few chocolate bars. The man watched him work with a dumb grin on his face. A strong smell of cedar wafted off of the stranger.
Cedar and chocolate chip cookies
, Liam thought. He piled all the candy into plastic bags, said the total, and took the man's cash. Liam paused to look at the crisp bills. They were the old kind with the small portraits. He hadn't seen any like them since he was a kid.
"Don't worry about the change," the man said. "And Merry Christmas." A laugh sort of rumbled through the man as he gathered the bags and headed out the door.
Liam followed him, intending to lock the door behind him. It also gave him the opportunity to watch where the man went, but, by the time Liam walked around the counter o the door, the man had vanished from the lot. No sign of tracks in the snow, though it did seem like a few deer had drifted by at some point. Liam flipped the OPEN sign switch. The neon fizzled into darkness. He put the man out of his mind and went about tidying up the store.
***
"Why don't we have a shed for employee parking," Liam grumbled as he raked snow off his windshield. He usually killed time when the store was empty by coming out and cleaning the car off. Made it easier at the end of the night. Today, for whatever reason, he'd forgotten. And so, after locking up he had to spend an extra fifteen minutes out in the freezing cold clearing enough of his windshield to get home. His house wasn't far away by Silverton standards. Most people lived out in the county, but his parents had built their house right at the edge of the city limits. Thus far in December, Liam had likened himself to Ebeneezer Scrooge going home to a dark and unlit house, squirreling himself away in the upper room to have a meager meal before cursing the entire town and going to a sleep of fitful dreams. So, it was a stretch to say that Liam looked forward to being home, but it was the best available alternative to standing at work or out in the snow.
Finally in the car, he sat for a while with his fingers held in front of the vents, relishing the warmth on his trembling hands. He threw the car into reverse, backed out of the lot with one last spiteful glare toward his necessary source of income, and then pulled out onto the dark road that would take him home. Christmas music played on the radio as he drove. It was the only station within range that wasn't country or some deranged preacher talking non stop about the end of days. Despite his continual foul mood, the old standards of the season remained catchy. Before long, he was drumming his fingers on the wheel to the tune of "Rocking around the Christmas Tree."
Ten minutes after he left work, Liam came to a clear stretch of the highway that ran between two open, fallow fields. The road had a thin layer of snow, but he had years of experience navigating snowy roads. He also very much wanted to be somewhere warmer, so he kept a quick speed. His finger drumming had evolved into a quiet singing. The thin beams of his Honda lit the road right in front of him, but otherwise the world was dark, the moonlight blocked by the snowclouds overhead. Still, Liam noticed something above him in the sky. Perhaps, he didn't see it so much as sensed it. Something drew his attention to the sky above him, and he saw several spots of faint, gleaming metal following him overhead. He leaned forward over the steering wheel, straining to get a better look at the peculiar lights and shadow. Could it be a low flying plane? Or an enormous animal of some kind?
His thoughts cut off as he saw something falling. A shape tumbled through the air end over end, getting larger as it fell closer. Liam's brain locked up. He didn't know what to do. Slamming on the breaks would case him to skid in the snow. Continuing on would surely result in a collision with the falling object. His heart thudded in his ears as seconds ticked by. He moved his foot to the brake and pressed down. The car lurched. Liam's body shifted forward, the seat belt pulling hard against his neck. The back side of the car started to swivel.
I'm going to flip
," he thought, but he kept his eyes on the object. In the next second, it slammed into the snow. The car kept moving and now the fallen object was directly in his path. Liam turned the wheel against the inertia of the swerving back half. His body jerked in the opposite direction, but the effort succeeded. The wheels gripped the road again. The car skidded to a stop only a few inches from the thing from the sky.
Liam's hands clutched the wheel, turned white from the pressure. He pried them off while his eyes remained fixed on the dent in the snow. Climbing out of the car, he first looked up to see if that shape in the sky remained, but it had vanished. He looked in either direction, hoping he would be lucky enough to have another car come along to help him make sense of the situation. Dread addling his senses, he started to walk toward the thing blocking the road.
The thing was the man from the shop. The large man with the white beard that smelled of cedar and chocolate had just fallen out of the sky. Liam looked up again as if the new information might suddenly make everything resolve into a logical explanation. It didn't. But it did help his brain to start moving again. He bent down to check on the man, but did not see any visible injuries. Instead, he saw a
thinness.
In the shop, the man had been very solid, but now Liam had the impression that if he tried, he could reach right through the man's body.
The man's eyes opened, looked around for a moment, then down toward his own body, and then right at Liam. "Seems I've run my course," he said before lapsing into that deep, rumbling chuckle. "Too many sweets. Shouldn't have been out driving. Where's Elfie? She's always...oh, oh right. There'll be a new Elfie. Looks like it's you, Liam. Don't worry about me. You'll understand one day." As the man spoke, he began to fade. Liam watched a full sized man that had fallen out of the sky vanish into snow flurries. They drifted down and joined the others.
