Night-Shift Constellations

The 24-hour gas station is an aquarium of light. He works the register; the parking lot keeps its own weather. At 1:12 a.m. a couple returns a rental carpet cleaner with glitter still in its lungs. At 1:40 a man buys a single tulip and a pack of AA batteries and says, “Don’t ask,” so he doesn’t.

When it’s slow, he turns the receipt tape into a map. Every void between purchases is a highway; every printed total is a town. He names them after things people say at his counter: Whatever Happens, Not Tonight, Do You Have a Bathroom. A fly explores the candy rack like a tourist who can’t read the signs.

At 2:03 a nurse in scrubs buys coffee and a lottery ticket, scratches in the parking lot, smiles like someone who got the number she actually needed—sleep—and drives away. At 2:26 the jukebox in the taquería next door coughs a song about not learning your lesson; the bassline finds the glass and hums along the windows.

He makes the coffee fresh because no one deserves the thick end of the pot. While it gurgles, thunder moves furniture in the sky. He slides open the little window, lets the rain talk. A teenager with a skateboard buys duct tape and applies it to the world’s most optimistic crack. “You think it’ll hold?” the kid asks. “Tonight it will,” he says, and it’s true because he said it.

At 3:00, a woman comes for windshield wiper blades and stays to tell him about a cat that chose her. She leaves with the soft certainty of people who’ve been adopted by smaller gods. He looks at the receipt map he’s drawn and adds one last town: You’re Good.

When his relief finally arrives, the rain has pressed the parking lot flat and polite. He pockets the receipt map instead of tossing it. On the walk home he uses it like a star chart, and for the length of one block, it works.