I knew I had asthma, but my mom never took me to the doctor, so there was no record of it. I coasted through MEPS, but just two weeks into basic, I was discharged. Entry Level Separation. I wasn’t even there long enough to collect benefits. I thought about getting off at a random stop and just starting over somewhere new on the bus leaving Parris Island, but I never did. It was back to southern Georgia before I knew it. I didn’t notice it as a child, but southern Georgia is a wasteland. There’s nothing here, and it’s not the mystical nothingness that you can find in the desert. You don’t learn anything in the empty spaces here. There’s no contemplation. It’s just heat, cattle, and muddy water. I did nothing but drink beer in my room and play video games the entire first week I was back. Mom was off with her third boyfriend of the year. She was gentle and considerate the first night I was back, but she quickly moved on. I can’t say I blame her. The terrible relationships she consistently found herself in were the only escape from the crushing boredom. They’d all leave her after a gigantic blow-up, but it was better than sitting around watching Maury. In many ways, becoming white trash is a kind of biological adaptation to having nothing better to do.
After about 2 weeks, I’d drained my bank account. I knew I was leaving, but I had yet to figure out how I was going to do it. The military was out, obviously. I’d seen various perverts online go teach English in poor Asian countries, but I wasn’t really cut out for that. My options for a rapid launch out of Berlin, GA, were nil. Mom had the car. When it dawned on me that I’d probably have to work at the Dollar General, I thought about maybe just selling drugs. It was a short-lived thought. There was no money in selling grass, and I didn’t have the stomach to sling fentanyl. I managed to convince myself that Dollar General was just to buy some time.
I didn’t even have to formally apply. I just walked in and asked if they were hiring. The woman whom I would later come to know as Gert went back to her office and returned with a W-4. She said I was welcome to start right then and there, but I lied and told her I had to wrap some stuff up at home. I really just wanted one more evening to myself, not that I filled it with anything. It was more about grasping out and trying to capture time to prove that I still had some basic level of agency in my life.
It was unseasonably hot on my first day. My mom still had the car, so I rode my bike. I was covered in sweat and partially drenched through by the time I arrived. Gert was out front smoking a cigarette. Her smile caught me off guard. Her teeth were all brown. Stepping into the brutally frigid store while wet made me feel like I had a fever. Gert showed me around the store and explained that most shifts I would be working with her or Damien, the only other employee. She said she would close nearly every night. There wasn’t much to do. Gert seemed to take on most of the responsibilities. She didn’t even want Damien and I stocking shelves unless she gave us the okay. The only thing she seemed comfortable with us doing was checking out the customers. To me, the money side of things seemed the most important aspect of the store, but for Gert, taking care of the product and keeping the shop in good condition seemed to matter the most.
My first few shifts were with Gert. She mostly kept to herself and spent a good chunk of the day outside smoking cigarettes. She showed me how to check people out, how to put money in the safe, and how to open the store. I had it down quickly. It wasn’t difficult.
I met Damien a few days later. He was a few years older than me, but I recognized him from school. I wouldn’t have recognized him now, though. He had a spider web tattoo underneath his right eye and had bleached his hair blonde. He had a noticeably forced blaccent that he attributed to his time in the Atlanta music scene. He smelled like marijuana all of the time and was skinny as a rail. Over time, I came to suspect that he was into more than smoking pot, but I always kept him at a distance.
The first month flew by. I think because it was all new, it helped the time pass. By the second month, time dragged. We were lucky if we had a handful of customers every hour. I wondered how the place managed to stay in business. Almost everyone just bought beer and cigarettes. I couldn’t wrap my head around why they bothered stocking the rest of the store, not that Gert let us really do that anyway. She said everything was organized in a very specific way and that she didn’t want us to mess it up.
By the third month, time moved so slowly I was beginning to question my sanity. Besides checking out customers, the only other Gert-approved tasks were mopping or cleaning the bathroom. Sometimes when Damien was rapping along to music from his phone, I would choose to mop instead of looking at the clock. Gert loved his rapping. She’d often flash her brown, corroded smile and compliment what a great artist he was. Part of me would want to roll my eyes, but I couldn’t tell if she was just busting his chops. I tried not to interact with it too much, but there was also this nascent understanding that perhaps giving up could be a kind of reward. I began to see the store as a kind of comfortable swamp that, if I let myself, I could easily sink into and never leave. I was constantly fighting between being bored and hating the place, and drifting off into pleasant daydreams, staring at nothing.
I’d never really paid attention to the items, since Gert told us not to touch them, but as I mopped, I was forced to give them a closer look. They were all off. The brands I was all familiar with, but the fonts seemed ever so slightly different. I’d never seen Shake N Bake flavored Pringles. When I googled Berry Birthday Cake Mountain Dew, I got no results. I chalked it up to failed limited runs that never made it to general distribution.
As time went on, I had more strange observations. There was always some explanation I could dig up, but they were becoming more and more far-fetched. Early on, I’d noticed that all of the songs played over the radio were covers. This, in itself, I didn’t think was super odd. Maybe it had something to do with copyright? I knew Wal-Mart had its own radio station. The confusing part was that sometimes the lyrics were wrong, but never in the same place. I’d heard “Treasure” by Bruno Mars every other day since I’d started working at Dollar General, but sometimes the singer would replace “Treasure” with “Pressure”. Other times, he’d skip the last verse, or the guitar solo would be swapped out for a piano solo.
The longer I worked there, the more questions I had. Why did no one ever come to refill the big propane tanks outside? Why did Gert always want to close? I hadn’t realized it at first, but I eventually realized that she didn’t have a car either. Was she walking home from the store in the dark?
I tried to bring these things up with Damien, but he was becoming increasingly difficult to communicate with. By the end of my third month, I began to suspect he was using opiates. He was slow to answer questions and sometimes would completely zone out in front of customers. He wasn’t doing a complete fent fold yet, but I could see it on the horizon. He would pull himself together for a few days at a time, but then he’d show up completely out of it for a week after, like he had to make up for lost time. It wasn’t long until the rapping stopped. I’d catch him nodding off while he tried to mop or count the money in the cash register. Gert would see it happen and just laugh. She’d say, “He must just be tired,” or “All that performing wore him out.” I couldn’t wrap my head around it. She didn’t seem to care. There was no way she didn’t know what was going on.
There were a handful of shifts where it was just Gert and I. She would spend most of the shift in the back office or out front smoking cigarettes. Sometimes, she’d invite me out for a smoke, and occasionally I’d join her. We wouldn’t talk much. I’d ask boilerplate small talk questions about her past just to kill the silence, and she’d respond with mumbles or jokes that tailed off into nothing. Most of the time, she’d lean against the wall and rub the back of her fingers against the rough brick like she was caressing a cat. A few times, I could have sworn I’d hear her whispering, too. I’d rush through the cigarette and come inside with my head spinning from the nicotine. Every time I’d come into the store, the lights would flicker. It seemed like the longer I worked there, the more they would do it. I became concerned for my mental health. I’d read about people left in solitary confinement in prison going completely off the rails, and wondered if something similar was happening in the Dollar General.
The day I came in, determined to quit, I found Damien collapsed behind the counter. He’d overdosed. His face was blue, and his eyes were open, staring off into the flickering fluorescent lights. I ran to the back of the store to see if there was any Narcan in the office, but instead crashed right into Gert.
“He’s dead. I know,” she croaked.
Her tone shook me. It was so cold.
“Better him than you. He only produces a single spawn every 75 years, ya know. It was either you or Damien. But personally, I always knew it was you. I let him feast on Damien a little too much. In some ways, I wonder if his untimely demise is a little bit my fault.”
She chuckled.
“Anyways, looks like the choice has been made for you. Most choices in life are.”
I thought she had been huffing duster or having some kind of psychotic episode. I pulled out my phone and began to dial 911. Before I could hit 1, it was slapped out of my grasp.
“Now, just you wait, boy! Ain’t no one in a rush for him.”
She took me firmly by the arm and led me back into her office. She swept a ratty rug aside and revealed a hatch that looked like a large scab. She peeled it back and jerked me forward, forcing me to look down the hatch. Below, there was something massive and pulsating that my mind didn’t have a reference for. There was red-black flesh arranged into tubes, illuminated by some kind of dim bioluminescence. Shoving me back, she grabbed a hooked pole off the wall and dropped it down into the flesh pit. There were some grotesque sounds of wet bodily tissues being sloshed together as Gert struggled to pull out what looked like a tonsil the size of a small boulder. Lying it on the ground, she pulled out a box cutter and slit the membrane open. Inside was a pristine box of Little Debby snack cakes. They were Easter Bunny Red Velvet Cream Cakes.
“He thinks ‘em up. Incredible, ain’t it?”
By this point, I was beginning to fear I was dead and that I’d gone to hell. I wondered if maybe there was some kind of gas leak and we’d all died. I didn’t say anything. I looked down into the gore pit, completely numb.
“Yeah, I remember when I first saw him for what he is. You get used to it, though. Hell, I first met him after the war. 1866 or something like that. Husband dead from Yankee minnie ball, and daughters dead from consumption and yellow fever. Was turnin’ tricks over in Brunswick to carpetbaggers just so I had a place to live. Injun trader told me about a more respectable job if I wanted it. Been here ever since. Used to be a general store.”
I looked on in awe. I still didn’t have the strength to utter a word.
“Crazy thing about livin’ this long. You’d think people would notice that I don’t kick the bucket, but they don’t. They all go on and die, and I just stay here. No one even bats an eye.”
I managed to get a few words out.
“How are you still alive? How old are you?”
Gert laughed so hard she had a coughing fit.
“Oh, I’m old enough, honey. Caretakers don’t really die unless they get themselves kilt. You’ll know soon enough.”
The fluorescent lights flickered, and this time it felt like it was trying to tell us something.
Gert smiled.
“He says he’s glad it’s you. He wants me to tell you how his kind feeds so you can take care of his youngin’.”
The lights flickered and buzzed at different intervals for several moments. Gert appeared focused. Listening isn’t the right verb, but it was something similar.
“He says they live off of mental energy. His word was psychic quanta, but I ain’t quite too sure what that means. Says that people, when they dream, have big aspirations, long shots, Hail Marys, etc., that they produce something they can live on. Says you’d be a good caretaker since you ain’t got any. Said he knew you’d be perfect the moment you walked through them doors.”
Their silent conversation continued. Gert chuckled and flashed her brown teeth. She appeared to be blushing.
“Sorry, don’t mean to leave you out of the conversation. We’re just having a laugh.”
It’s hard for me to perfectly articulate, but in watching their conversation, something clicked within me. I’d never been selected for anything. My whole life had been one long, forced application and rejection cycle. The creature was right about my lack of ambition. It wasn’t always that way. It took 20 years of being flattened and told no at every turn. Outsiders might have written it off as a kind of laziness. I knew it was really a defense mechanism. You can’t get crushed when you’ve given up. The creature understood this. It knew. I couldn’t decipher their conversation, but I felt the relationship and knew how she came to care for whatever it was. It was something so old that it had no use for human beings' petty machinations. It needed survival, and it was content with just that. Simplicity.
Gert continued.
“I was gorging him on Damien. That fool dreamed big. All those comments to keep pursuing his little songs. Oh, we both knew he was terrible! Think I led him on a bit too much, and he ate up all that mental energy. 3 months here, and that boy had nothing left. Probably overdosed on purpose.”
I noticed a smirk forming on my face as well.
There wasn’t just simplicity with these creatures. There was a kind of justice.
Gert pulled out another gorebag from the bowels of the store. Inside, there was a Mountain Dew bottle with my name on it.
“You drink this one, and his spawn is gonna be with you. You go to the next town over, and you piss on some empty lot. He’ll grow faster than you can believe. It might be a Dollar General. It might be a vape shop. Depends on what it thinks the area wants. The bigger he gets, the bigger the area of withdrawal gets. This guy here, he can eat the dreams of a 10-mile radius.”
I took the Mountain Dew and drank it. I belched, and Gert smiled.
It felt good to be a business owner.
-- Wallace Mack is an American writer. He is the author of the novel "Corndog Zen" and the poetry collection "Pure Youth," published with Plague Circus Press. He is currently seeking publication of his second novel, Buckaroo Ridge. He can be found on X @WallaceMack_
