I Work the Night Shift at an Isolated Gas Station. Things Are Weird Out Here.

A gas station attendant working the night shift at an isolated outpost on the edge of town learns that his workplace is not a convenience store at all, but a crossing point for things older than humanity. When he breaks the first and only rule—never ask what the creatures are—he is given a way out, but the price of escape turns out to be everything he ever was.

The Crossing and the First Rule

The narrator took the job because nobody asked questions about it: twenty dollars an hour, cash if you wanted it, seven at night to seven in the morning at a gas station past the last stop before the road turns into nothing for another forty miles. The first night was slow in the way that makes the clock feel broken. Then a woman in a long trench coat and wide-brimmed hat walked in without making a sound on the tile. She was bone dry despite the rain, and the cold that came with her stayed in the room after the door shut. The narrator, trying to break the silence with a joke, asked her what she was. She stopped walking. Under the hat was a deer skull—gray, cracked, with empty eye sockets that still somehow watched him. The voice came out like dry leaves scraping across a driveway. "You're not supposed to ask what we are." She explained that the station sits outside the roads and the clocks. Things older than his kind cross here, feed here, pass through on their way to places his eyes