The Invitation
Dipping my toes into horror... here is a frightening experience of a homeless woman living in rural America. short story fiction.
Content warning for violence.
I called out sick today. It is 9am, and I am sitting in the police station. I am holding a cup of warm coffee between my knees. I have already been interviewed, but the police say they want to keep me longer for more questions. I want to go home.
I hate my job. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t take this stupid job.
I work at a gas station off I-95. Night shift. It’s as dreamy as you can imagine. We get a lot of truckers, and most of them are rude and leering. When I started working there, I tried to be nice, but then men would assume I was flirting with them. Now I act standoffish, but they still invade my space. Some of them comment on my body. One time, a man cornered me while I was cleaning the bathroom, and he laughed at me when I ran away. I told my manager and he said “They aren’t touching you, are they? Well, good.” He thinks I’m overreacting. Nobody cares.
I’d work somewhere else, but it was hard to even convince the gas station to hire me. I dropped out of high school, and I have a record. Nothing violent, just stealing when I was a teenager. But that’s enough for most places to refuse me. This was the only job I could get, and I intend on keeping it ‘til I get out of this hole I’m in.
I’ve been living in the homeless shelter for the past few months. It’s crowded in there, and I share a room with 3 other women. I barely know their names, and we don’t talk. I don’t know where they go during the day, and they don’t know anything about me either. It’s tense. We all know we’re living through bullshit, but we’re too exhausted and sensitive to talk about it. That, combined with the constant surveillance by the people working there, makes it feel like you’re walking on eggshells.
The shelter is down the street from the gas station. Which is convenient, I guess, because I don’t have a car. It’s a short walking distance, but I’m worried about people knowing where I live, and following me. I don’t want people to know how vulnerable I am. I don’t want them to hurt me.
Not all of the customers are bad, of course. Most of them barely say anything to me. There’s a couple of old ladies who come in at the beginning of my shift, and they’re always sweet. They smile, ask me about my day, and make sure to compliment my hair. One of them keeps saying “I wish I could do hairstyles like that” and that makes me chuckle. I like to read behind the register, and there’s one skinny dude who always asks me about what I’m reading. These kinds of customers make the work tolerable.
Two months ago, I started befriending this one customer, Robert. Each time he comes in he buys the same thing: a full tank of gas and a 12oz Diet Coke. I guessed that he was in his 70s. He was wrinkled and his hair was white. His back was a little hunched, and he had the voice of a salesman.
I’m not sure what he said to make me put my walls down, but I found myself chatting with him longer than the rest of my customers. Or rather, he kept standing there and talking to me while I was on my shift, and neither of us had better things to do. Regardless, unlike a lot of the men who came into the gas station, I made an effort to smile and greet him when he came in.
He was clearly lonely, but very smart. He asked me about my books, and he had a lot of opinions about them. He recommended a bunch of things for me to read; old authors I have no interest in, international newspapers, local literary magazines…
“Wait, do you write?”
“Um, yeah, I write poetry sometimes.”
“You should publish something! Just speaking to you, I know you’re a good writer.”
“But you haven’t even read anything I wrote.”
“I know it.”
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