In a world crying out for stories, this author makes an attempt. Unrefined and unedited, we make no promises of high quality, but you can’t beat the price.
Rosemary Breen shuffled into the gas station in a dingy grey sweatshirt zippered over the red polo shirt, the Artic Zone logo peeking out between the jagged metal edges. She was a nebulous woman who could pass for any age between 23 and 42, soft white skin speckled with acne, greasy hair pulled into a low ponytail.
Bethany was behind the counter when Rosemary entered, nodding her head of snarled reddish-blond dreadlocks in greeting. The two women were a study in contrasts: where Bethany was quick and thin, Rosemary was thick and slow. Bethany, at 33, looked younger than Rosemary, fresher. A closer look at Bethany hinted at a difficult life, her eyes circled by dark shadows and her cheeks taut. In a town of few jobs, the women ended up at the Artic Zone gas station, exchanging brief hellos.
“Hi, Rosy! How are you?” Bethany chirped. Rosemary, seeming to blend into the grey day gave a noncommittal shrug and plodded to the back of the store to check the bathrooms, the first duty of every shift. A stench and pile of dirty paper towels told her Harold had been in after muddying his hand on the riverbank out back “fishing.” By fishing, everyone assumed Harold meant drinking, and in the quiet, enabling courtesies of small-town life the gas station ladies tidied up after Harold whenever he walked through, asking no questions and expecting no change.
Emerging from the bathroom, Rosemary barely glanced as Bethany bounded out from behind the booth, satchel on her arm, Birkenstocks cracked and frayed to the point of near-total decomposition on her feet. “Gotta go pick up Amethyst! See ya later,” Bethany sang from the door, not meeting Rosemary’s eye. “Oh, I almost forgot,” she said turning midway through the door, “Frank stopped by asking for you. Something about a party?” Ending on a note of disinterested inquiry, Bethany disappeared before anything else could be said.
Rosemary, slouched behind the register, looked like she had received the slightest electric shock. A look approaching interest flashed across her dull features. For a girl who received so little attention, the insinuation of invitation was a thrill that even decades of practiced apathy could not hide.
“Frank…?” she said softly to the empty room as Bethany ducked into the passenger-side of a decrepit green Subaru idling in the parking lot. As if summoned, Frank emerged from the evergreens on the edge of the parking lot as Bethany’s ride pulled onto the road.
Frank’s eyes were slightly bulging in his sallow face. His features were glassy and tired. Where the other three dozen students at the local high school never moved beyond the recreation of filling a Jeep with marijuana smoke and driving aimlessly around back roads, Frankie had ventured farther afield to clubs and apartments offering more exotic fare. Gradually, pills of unknown source and uncertain substance found their way into his pockets. A puerile addiction to candy and fast food melted into a skeletal addiction to thrills. Clothes hung baggily on his slight frame, cash went missing from his coworkers’ purses at the local pool.
“Hey, Rose! You going to the party tomorrow night?” Rosemary looked mutely at him from beneath her greasy bangs of an indecipherable shade of brown.
“Yah, I guess so,” she finally said lamely.
“Maybe I’ll see you there.” As strangely as he had emerged from the woods, Frank turned and walked out of the store, fumbling for something in his pocket as he ambled across the parking lot.
Parties in such a small town could hardly be an exclusive affair, and Rosemary could have gone to any; she simply didn’t see the point. Until now. An invitation, from anyone, was an experience she rarely had. What did people do at parties? Travis told visitors to the town that they just “hung out trees and did drugs.” This summed it up, though they sometimes rode around in cars and did drugs. Sometimes they talked about staking out the cemetery looking for the ghost lady. Rosemary’s mouth twitched in a spasm of something approaching hope as her manager pulled into the parking lot.
The hint of a smile vanished from her face as she saw the manager’s son, Collin, hop down from the Jeep. Collin’s red polo, identical to Rosemary’s, suggested that he would be behind the booth with her for the afternoon, his gelled blond head bobbing to bad rap music as he babbled to Rosemary about town gossip and his life’s dreams. Rosemary relished the days when the store was empty and she just sat.
Her grandmother didn’t know where Rosemary was going, not that she ever did. Rosemary’s “Nan” was a ruddy woman in baggy sweats, a loose grey T-shirt, usually smeared with dirt from yesterday’s yard work. The matriarch of a sprawling clan of thick-jawed, pale-skinned New Englanders, Nan rarely betrayed emotion other than irritation or rage, different registers of the same primal emotion.
As her children abandoned first one and then another of her grandchildren in her home to be raised, Nan made it clear that she would not be overly involved in their lives. She cooked rarely, dug in the dirt regularly, scouted the forest for edible mushrooms, smoked often, and drank heavily on holidays. Hers was not a warm presence but still sufficiently maternal to make Rosemary and her cousins Fin and Tucker feel like they were not homeless. Fin and Tucker had long since gone, enlisted in the Army, and left town. Only Rosemary lingered on at age 29, leading Nan to make biting remarks about the amount of food she ate and the responsibility she continued to shirk. Nan was known to let fly a profanity-laced sermon at the slightest provocation, loudly reminding anyone in hearing range that Rosemary was a guest in her home.
Most of the time, Rosemary didn’t mind. She was used to being singled out and shamed. Like the time she proudly wore her new sweatshirt to sixth grade field day, something really new and not just a hand-me-down from concerned neighbors. The sweatshirt had ladybugs, which were an obsession for Rosemary. One of the more alert bullies, Jeremy Hedge, noticed that the ladybugs matched the ladybug pencil case, notebook, and bracelet that Rosemary brought to school most days. “What, do you really like bugs? Ladybug girl! Gross bug girl, probably like to lick bugs and put them down her shirt!”
The class of 15 students zeroed in on their prey, and for the rest of the year, Rosemary could not set foot outside her Nan’s house without someone harassing her about bugs.
Rosemary was unphased by the casual cruelty of proximity. What she wasn’t prepared for was flattery. She carefully selected a strapless, tiered, purple metallic top to wear over her jeans. She fantasized that the tiers would attractively cover the rolls of pale white flesh on her torso, the protrusion above once loose jeans. She even considered wearing her hair down but thought better of it upon seeing the sharp crease made by the elastic in her greyish brown hair.
“Where you going dressed like a hooker? You going to start paying more rent?” Nan said gruffly when she looked up from “Wheel of Fortune” to see Rosemary’s unaccustomed attire.
“No, Nan. See you later,” was all Rosemary replied, grabbing the keys to the Oldsmobile and stepping quickly for the door before Nan could demand her keys back. Tucker and Fin had gone to all the parties, and they when they were 15, but Nan, whether for reasons of sex or unpopularity, sensed that Rosemary didn’t belong at a party.
Rosemary hoped Nan wouldn’t check the family Bible tonight, hollowed out to store wads of cash Nan didn’t trust the bank with. Rosemary had left most of it, she reassured herself, only borrowing a few bills. Just in case.
Continue reading in part 2.
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