MicroHorror

The man behind the counter watched out the window with sweaty excitement. A squat silver car pulled into the gas station and flirted cautiously with one of the pumps. For a moment it looked like it might stop but suddenly lost its nerve; the tires squealed, and soon the car was back on the highway, burning to get some distance between it and its little detour.

“That’s another one’s passed us by,” the man behind the counter groaned. “I just don’t get it, do you?”

His brother, who’d been helping himself to beef jerky while they waited, raised his hunting knife to his lips thoughtfully. After a few seconds’ deep consideration: “What number’d you put up on the big sign out there, anyways?”

“I don’t know. A dollar-fifty?”

“Well, there’s your problem. A buck-fifty? There ain’t a gas station in this state sellin’ it for less than two-seventy a gallon today. Y’ought to go out there and bump it up. A dollar’ll do.”

“I don’t understand.” The man behind the counter dug well trimmed nails into his scalp and scratched like it was going to help. “If they’re not stopping now, why wouldn’t we lower the price instead of raising it?”

His brother arched his back with the posture of a self-satisfied college professor. Strange that someone who ditched school at sixteen and never went back would look the part so well. “You see,” he began, “no matter what you might think, people really can smell a deal that’s too good to be true. You see gas more than a dollar cheaper than any place else’s got it, you’d be crazy not to think something’s going on. But twenty cents?” He spat on the dirty tile floor. “Twenty cents cheaper a gallon and you’ll have people lined up around the block.”

The man behind the counter looked down at his neatly pressed sweater and thought about it a moment. “I can see where you’d be right,” he said. “I’ll change the sign.” And so he knelt down behind the counter, nudged aside the cold, blood-smeared body of the gas station clerk who’d been working when they came in, and grabbed the box with the plastic number sheets in it.

“Twenty cents is all it’ll take,” his brother insisted, and he was probably right.

There are three of them, and they only come after my wife and young daughter have gone to bed. They make no effort to be quiet when they arrive; they hurl the front door open, no matter how many locks I put on it, and slam it shut behind them. Each step is punctuated by the typewriter clacking of bone against bone. When they speak, it’s in high-pitched howls, laughing and crying; they have a drunk’s wild abandon paired with a sober intensity and meticulousness in every word. But my family never wakes up, and so I understand that these sounds are made for me only.

All I know is that I am somehow responsible for them, but when I ask why they only tease and scream nonsense in my face. I don’t understand–I’m no murderer or rapist, no criminal. I’ve done some terrible things in my life, the same as anybody has–I’ve lied and cheated, I’ve hurt people deliberately with words, I’ve refused to help people I knew really needed it. So I can only conclude that somewhere along the line, one of these common, everyday sins has had some unintended consequence–that some thoughtless misdeed run through the Rube Goldberg machine of time and human events resulted in some terrible crime I never meant to commit that nonetheless claimed three lives. But I have no idea what it was.

They know, though, and they say one day they’ll tell the world. They’ve promised the knowledge will ruin me: friends will pretend they never knew me, people on the street will spit as I pass, and my family will leave–leave running with tears squeezed from eyes heavy with looks of disgust. Sometimes I get a little wild myself and yell that they have no power, that nobody’s going to believe a bunch of skeletons spreading slander about a decent man like myself. But, inside, I know that if they can walk without muscles and talk without tongues, there’s probably no limit to what they can do. They promise all I have to do to ensure their silence is do as they ask.

They want me to take a knife and go out into the night and make them a fourth partner.

I tell them I’d never do it; I’d never deliberately add to the blood already on my hands, unmeant and unseen. They smile politely as I shout and storm–with no lips, they can’t help but smile–and when I’m done they ask me if I’m quite certain of my decision. And I tell them I am.

But after they leave I walk through the house in the dark and see my daughter in her bed, the covers pulled snug around her face, and my wife rolled over to one side of our bed, dreaming and waiting for me to join her.

I have decided to do as the skeletons request.