A mountain, snow-capped and brooding, a valley of slouching pine, a lonely cyclops of a sunset, waning motes of fire in a snowbound village. Children of elder time, in whose devotion / The chainless winds still come and ever came. Christmas muzak on the loudspeaker—And what have you done?—interrupted by a page from Customer Service, “Wine & Spirits, line one.”

I answer, “This is Carson in Good Spirits.” I keep staring at the wallpaper of a mountain above the walk-in cooler. Any other day, I’d prefer the Italian vineyard above the cabinets of red varietals, the hills blurred by golden sunbeams. Everyone can tell that I’m high. “How may I help you?”

“Y’all sell pony kegs of Bud Heavy?” the man asks. I can hardly hear him over the wheezing shitbox he’s driving. Why are there children running around here?

I hate kegs, but I say, “Yes, we do.” The old lady at my register is staring at the card reader as the screen flashes: Please remove card. Please remove card. Please remove card. “Try swiping it.”

“How much is it?” the man asks.

“$70,” I say, “and there’s a $20 deposit.”

“For a pony?” the man scoffs. He wants me to think his pride outweighs his desire. It never does, not for these people. These people. Like I’m not selling my soul right now. “I’ll swing by around two,” he says.

The line for our registers ends at the gateway between our department and the rest of Good Grocery, the longest I’ve ever seen it. Christmas is in two days and there’s supposed to be a snowstorm from hell tonight. Another year over. When the sliding door opens, white phantoms dance in the vortex.

My boss, Tina, drags a bag of blue salt over to the door. She looks nothing like a catfish, but I can’t help but see one when I look at her. She speaks in a Southern drawl with a heavy vocal fry, clicking her tongue with an “um” after everything she says. She’s unsure of everything.

Beth is on the bargaining stage of grieving our third register. “Come on, please.” Between this place and special-needs teaching, she deserves sainthood. The whole line is staring at her. She’s scratching her head so much that her Cocker Spaniel hair is frayed as if touched by static. I understand the weight of being seen as useless. When customers ask what I want to do and I confess that I’m studying creative writing, they never ask what I want to do with the degree. This is the terminus.

“Beth, do you want to take my register?” I ask. “I can fill the doors.”

“Yes please,” she says. She mutters “God” somewhere in there, “please God,” “yes God.”

I put on gloves and scout the cooler doors. A wasteland. I don’t even know where to start. I hide behind the cider shelf in the cooler to check my phone.

The boys are blowing up the group chat with a hundred pictures of Nolan: sharp posture in his Air Force uniform, cupping a tetrahedron he 3D-printed, leaping over a bonfire, in tighty-whities holding a WWII rifle, cuddling his golden retriever, Belle. I don’t want to think about his dog.

A man with a head shaped like a squashed bell pepper (PLU 4088) is staring at me over the shelf. “Do you need help finding something?” I ask.

The man just stares. He’s wearing a double-breasted meat department jacket. His backpack hangs in front of his belly like a kangaroo pouch. In it, I can see four filets, upon which lies a handle of McCormick.

“Breakfast of champions,” I say.

The meat man slowly backs away like I’m a mountain lion. I admire thieves that steal cheap things. They don’t have a warped sense of value. We’re all prone to the fallacy that a label determines a product’s quality. I admire the meat man. He’s only concerned with how intoxicated he gets.

I start stocking Heineken. Something about the grinding of ice chunks in the humming fans lulls me into a flow state. I spend most of my time at work brainstorming my Great American Novel(s), but I’ve been pretty uninspired for a while. I imagine the process like an oil well, drilling toward a nascent pool. Lately, it’s more like a black geyser erupting in a jet of flame.

The six pack I’m carrying disintegrates. Glass bottles drop upon the earth like warheads. All but one explode in a deluge of green glass and golden rapids, little pearls of fluorescent light bursting within the tide. Fucking mother of fuck. I punt the undetonated ordinance and it hits the crossbeam of the Miller shelf, exploding in a deluge of green glass, golden rapids, pearls, etcetera. The flayed six pack dangles in my hands. The bottom is dotted by white-ringed craters of moldy fur. I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least. Fucking mother of fuck.

I fill the mop bucket at the sink in the stockroom, dumping an arbitrary amount of bleach into the water. Tina and Beth glare at me from the registers. They know what I’ve done. Three vendors are setting up tasting booths in the aisle. Sasha should be here any minute. I like working with Sasha because she has social anxiety like me, a rare symbiosis without an obligation to speak.

The expired beer smells like how vomit tastes. I sweep the glass then mop. The gray concrete drinks the water, darkens like a storm cloud. I hate the smell of bleach.

As I return the mop bucket, I see that one of the vendors left three shots on the backstock shelf. God bless. I shudder at the smell of the peanut butter whiskey and dimly recall writhing in a hospital bed and riding shoeless in a cab at dawn. I didn’t even know there were still cabs in Kansas City. Someone must have given this to me on my 21st. Not even a year ago, damn. I told myself I’d never get that drunk again.

Three weeks ago, I drank most of a 750ml bottle of Wild Turkey. Jason had called just before to tell me that Nolan died. When nobody tells you how someone died, it’s usually because they killed themself. I punched a closet door off the hinges. It felt cartoonish and theatrical even then. That door hangs crooked now. I had purchased the Wild Turkey for Thanksgiving dinner at my dad’s house, but I forgot to bring it.

I knew Nolan had just gotten out of the psych ward. I knew he owned guns. I knew he was lonely in Abilene. I could have reached out. I can’t stop wondering where his dog is.

The saloon door swings hard into my mop bucket. Gray water soaks my pant leg. “Can you shovel?” Beth asks. She doesn’t wait for an answer.

Beth must know I’m high. I can’t tell if I smell like weed, but surely opening the door to find me like this—pink owl eyes, fake blond hair disheveled, hunched over a row of shots like a caveman over a flame—tells her I’m not all there.

I take a shovel off the hook and head out front. I scoop the snow into mounds on either side of the sliding door. I toss some salt around. The blue crystals are hypnotizing, kaleidoscopic color trapped within them, infinitely refracting. Opalescent, phosphorescent.

Back inside, Tina tells me that the third register is fixed. A daughter and her mother arrange their stuff on the counter. The daughter has black hair and green eyes, the mother has reddish hair and brown eyes. How can I be sure they’re related? It must be the way they stand, not just their proximity, but their self-soothing posture: folded arms, shoulders bowed inward.

“How are you guys today?” I ask.

The snowfall is so dense now that the cars crawling in the street are hazy. A scarf-wrapped man passes into the white partition, dissolves.

“Good,” the daughter says. She places a bottle of chocolate-cherry liqueur and a six pack of Redd’s on the counter. 

“Do you have your ID?” I ask the daughter, seeing it already in her hand.

Her name is Myra. I check the DOB in the top right: 12/23/1998. The Budweiser clock on the wall says, “WE I.D.” and “MUST BE BORN ON OR BEFORE THIS DATE” above a digital display that reads “12/23/1998.” I get it now.

“Happy birthday,” I say quietly. I don’t want to embarrass her.

“Thank you,” Myra says quietly.

Loudly, the mother says, “We’re celebrating her 21st at home tonight.”

Myra lets her hair fall, hiding her face. Maybe she doesn’t have anyone else to celebrate with. That’s sad, isn’t it? No, that’s patronizing. Of course she has friends, everyone has friends, surely this freak storm ruined her plans. What’s wrong with getting drunk with one’s mother on one’s 21st birthday? It dawns on me that I am her first (legal) purveyor of booze. As the weight of that settles on me, then comes Barry.

Barry is a cook at the Red Lobster across the lot. I often see him three times a day. He comes in, buys five shooters of American Honey, then goes back to the grind. There’s always a nod, a pretense that I didn’t just sell to him two hours ago, that his pupils aren’t wide and lazy. I tell myself, “A job’s a job,” but that doesn’t stop me from imagining an Olympic pool filled with all the alcohol I’ve ever sold, plenty to drown in. This is my contribution to the world. This is all I would have amounted to if I happened to die now.

Everyone falls silent as the walls moan. The wind heaves like an orgy of asthmatic turtles.

A man with ashen mutton chops prowls up to the counter with a cheesecake sampler. “I called earlier and talked to someone named Carlton about a pony keg,” he says.

Read my name tag, moron. C-A-R—oh, my jacket covers it. “Yeah, that’s me,” I say.

While the man fills out his information on the keg deposit form, I wheel a dolly to the cooler. The half-size Budweiser is buried in the back corner because of course it is. I dig it out and, in doing so, leave one of the kegs in the aisle. It’s fine. I’ll get it later.

I return to the counter and finish the keg form. I could have helped five customers by now. I peel a sticker with a barcode from the binder and wrap it around the keg’s handle.

“Don’t lose the sticker,” I tell the man. “We need that to return your deposit.”

He clicks his tongue, like he’s the annoyed one, like he understands how meaningless this all is, and I have no clue.

“Can you bring it to my truck?” the man asks.

The sliding door opens for nobody. The snow is blowing sideways. The dull orange bloom of a streetlight shimmers within the silver dusk.

I really don’t fucking want to, I want to say, but instead I put on my gloves and follow the man. There are holes across the truck’s sun-bleached body, chewed by rust. He unlatches the tailgate. “Lay her in there.” I lift the keg onto the tailgate and, in doing so, feel a prick in my pointer finger. There’s a severed zip tie on the handle.

“Thanks bud,” the man says. He hands me a $10 bill.

It would have cost me nothing to say no. A more willful person would have refused and been well within their right. And yet the world rewards me for supplanting my wants with what is wanted of me.

“That’s just the way it is,” Alexander Hamilton says. I crimp the bill to work his mouth. “There is a trail of breadcrumbs in the forest. You can follow it, and you can survive off breadcrumbs forever, but it will only take you in circles. Do you keep following the trail of breadcrumbs? Or do you break off and risk starvation to search for where you belong?”

I slide the bill into my wallet, stand there hypnotized by the rock salt some more, then go back in.

Tina is at my register, so I go to the stockroom to refill the craft beer. I feel something drip down my finger. I take off my gloves. A stream of blood trickles from a dark hole in my index. I wrap my finger in a towel that is damp with wine. Up front, I grab the first aid kit from under the computer.

“Let me see,” Beth says.

She uncovers my finger, coats my wound in Neosporin, and wraps it in a Band-Aid. Does she think I expected her help? I think most people are accustomed to expecting that nobody is going to help them.

“Your blood smells like merlot,” she says.

I wash the blood stains with hand sanitizer then check customers for another hour. Beth and Tina clock out at four, so Greg joins Sasha and I to be our third man. I feel like I’m the one experiencing third man syndrome when I work with Greg. Maybe it has to do with the way light shimmers upon his bald, diaphanous dome, giving him the appearance of something altogether incorporeal.

Greg has lived in a thousand zip codes and worked just as many odd jobs. I prefer the tales from Greg’s gregarious youth, back when he loved the world and did not profess to understand it, like how he lost his virginity at a Poison concert, or how he got into psychedelics at UC Santa Cruz and took a class on “The Harmonics of Nature,” where they would all go lay among the redwoods and tap on hand drums until they fell into a rhythm.

From the snow veil emerges a nun, white flakes sliding off her black habit. She takes a basket to the grocery side and returns with four boxes of plain wafers. She finds the Manischewitz in a low corner of the cheap wine aisle. She brings the Eucharist to my counter, surveys the plastic bins, and grabs two shooters of Captain Morgan as a tithe.

“Hello,” the nun says, sigh-singing the “o.”

“How are you?” I ask. She just nods.

I feel compelled to confess something to her, or maybe compelled to be forgiven. I would probably say that Jason and Bailey invited everyone to their apartment for a potluck the last time Nolan was back from Texas. Naturally, I brought alcohol: Riesling for the meal, a RumChata and Kahlúa cocktail for after. Nolan had a wheelchair in his trunk for some reason. He was walking just fine. That’s the only picture I have of the two of us, him fucking around in the wheelchair and me pushing him over the curb. I hardly spoke to Nolan at the party. I spent most of the night talking to Bailey’s sister, who stayed with me after everyone else went home and gave me head on the daybed while Jason and Bailey slept in their room.

The nun gazes into the wall of static. I can’t remember if she is waiting for me to say something or if I’m waiting for her.

I went to preschool in the basement of a church. There was a storage room beside the classroom and a window between them. From inside the classroom, we couldn’t see into the closet when the light was off. I’d gotten put in timeout for stepping on a kyphotic kid’s shoe and accidentally confessing that it was not an accident because I thought accident meant the opposite of what accident means, so they put me in the closet and turned the light off so I could pray. I remember sitting in that dark room, watching everyone else play with colors and shapes, but they couldn’t see me. That was the first time I thought about what it would be like to die. The closet smelled like bleach.

Then we all went out to the playground. It started to snow. I held tiny crystals in my hand. I remember wanting to be alone, now that I had a choice.

“Do you have plans on Wednesday?” the nun asks.

I forget about Christmas for a second and think she’s inviting me to something. “Yeah, I’m having dinner with my family,” I say.

“Wonderful,” she says. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.”

I dream about falling into my bed, sinking. The line finally wanes at 7:15. I can clock out in like forty minutes. Greg goes to check our displays on the grocery side and Sasha runs the trash cart to the back of the store.

I see black curls bobbing through the whiskey aisle. I wander over and peek at the man crouched there, turning over a bottle of Four Roses. Oh shit, that’s Kent. He’s still in town after the funeral.

In high school, our friend group played “Hostage” after we all got our driver’s licenses. Kent and I were once paired as “hostages.” Another team drove us to an abandoned sawmill and left us there for our team to retrieve. That was the game. It was around midnight. We had to walk along a gravel road until we had reception to call Nolan, who was our team’s driver. We followed a white fence looking for a landmark. A pair of dogs chased us on the other side of the fence, howling, teeth snapping. In the darkness, we couldn’t see them running alongside us.

Kent and I waited on a bridge over Little Moon Creek. I remember watching headlights curve around the bend, praying it was Nolan. The car stopped in front of us, moths fluttering in the beam. We shouted into the phone, “Is that you? Is that you?” Nolan stuck his head out and said, “Get in, pussies.”

As Kent kneels before the Four Roses, I recall him kneeling at the funeral, his fingers hanging onto the edge of the table upon which Nolan’s urn rested, sobbing so hard his stomach pulsed.

“Hey Kent.”

Kent stands and gives me a flat smile. “Hey Carson.”

We hug each other. We pat each other’s backs for inordinately long, maybe trying to unsettle something that’s stuck. Kent follows me to the counter with the Four Roses.

“Where are you living nowadays?” I ask.

“They have me out in Orlando until May.”

“When do you go back?”

“Friday,” Kent says. “Are you coming tonight?”

“To what?”

“We’re meeting at Golden Pockets,” he says. “It’s in the group chat. Jason said we can come to his apartment after. What time are you off?”

“I leave here in thirty,” I say. “I should make it.”

Kent nods. We’re silent as Sasha passes through. “They’re sending Nolan to space,” he says.

Nolan dreamed of going to space. When he joined the Air Force, he settled for the sky. I imagine his ashes orbiting within a belt of debris.

I nod. More silence. “Do you know where Belle is?” I ask.

“She’s staying with his mom,” Kent says. “I heard she likes taking naps in the henhouse.”

“That’s good,” I say.

Kent takes his bag and stares at the waning snow. I want to say more. I can tell Kent does too. We don’t know how to talk about it.

“Take care of yourself,” he says.

“You too.”

As Kent leaves, I feel nauseous. I go sit in the cooler. My palms stick to the beer and bleach on the ground. I check the group chat. Everyone will be at Golden Pockets. It’ll be nice to see everyone together again, but how are we supposed to go back to normal? We’re just going to drink and talk about anything else. If we do talk about Nolan, it’ll just be the good times. There are some things we can’t ignore forever.

But what choice do I have?

My breath escapes in light sobs, condensing into clouds. I miss my friend. I open the group chat and scroll through my camera roll to the photo of me pushing Nolan in the wheelchair. It would slot right into the collage of half-truth. It’s just not him. I close my phone without sending. My hot tears congeal into tiny crystals. Nothing will change the truth.

I wipe my face and exit the cooler. I just have to make it through this shift.

Greg starts stocking the cooler, but comes out a few minutes later gripping his back. “You alright?” I ask.

“I pulled a fuckin’ muscle moving a keg,” Greg says, groaning like an arrow-pierced elk. He tries to bend sideways, but winces. “Some dumbass left a keg in the aisle. I can’t work like this.”

Fuck me. Greg is supposed to be closing solo from ten to midnight. Nobody is going to get out in this blizzard to cover it. Either Sasha will have to stay or I will. She looks at me, probably realizing the same thing. It makes more sense for it to be her; she’s already here until ten. Beyond the sliding doors, the snowdrift along the median is half a foot high. The wind swells endlessly.

I can’t make Sasha stay alone in this mess. I left the keg sitting there. I deserve it.

But why do I deserve to be alone? I want out of this place. I want to floor it through the parking lot, tires squealing like slaughtered pigs.

All day long, I dream about things I never do. If I keep denying my dreams, maybe I’ll lose the capacity to create a new life for myself.

I should go be with my friends.

“Both of you should get home before the storm gets worse,” I say.

“Are you sure?” Sasha asks.

“Yeah, it’s no problem.” The words taste sour.

I help Greg pull on his stained sherpa jacket and Sasha lends him her arm. I watch them shrink down the main aisle toward the north lot. Someone switched off the Christmas music. Now it’s classic rock, “The Fool On The Hill.” It feels directed at me somehow.

All the displays are picked clean. I refill what we have. Between eight and nine, I don’t see any customers. If there isn’t a single customer by ten, I’ll close the department early. I could be fired for deviating from normal hours. Maybe getting fired wouldn’t be a bad thing.

I start facing the shelves. I fantasize about raking armfuls of liquor onto the floor. I can hear the shattering, the crystal rain. It would take two minutes to incur damages worth more than everything I’ve made in two years working here. One bottle of Don Julio is worth one day of work. One bottle of Woodbridge is one hour.

I stand in the gateway and watch the night stockers drift motorized pallets around. I wonder if they get lonely, being nocturnal. I swipe on Tinder for a while. Kerry, Janine, Monique. A hundred futures. I’m a blank slate. A true tabula rasa. I should be thrilled.

I stand at the side exit and look out. The moon is a fingernail of light. The highway is a trench of slush. The streetlights hang their heads like bluebells.

I watch the hour hand inch toward ten. Seven minutes. Zero customers between nine and ten. At this point, I’m doing my boss a favor by closing early. I vividly imagine the process of closing: lights, registers, doors. I imagine that someone might show up, someone who has had a long day, someone who could use a drink, someone who would feel heartbroken to find us closed early. I can’t do it. I have to stay for them, real or not.

I fuck around for another hour, mostly tossing a lemon into the air and dissociating. A car fishtails through the parking lot, following the faint treads of someone that came before. The driver parks by our doors. The headlights extinguish, a young woman approaches the door, and it opens for her. That’s the birthday girl from earlier. Myra?

“Welcome in,” I say.

“I’m surprised you’re still here,” Myra says.

“Me too.”

Her eyes are very red. Either she’s high or she’s been crying.

“I need something strong that doesn’t taste like battery acid.”

So, crying.

“I like white Monacos,” I say. “It’s like a vodka Red Bull.”

I show her the Monacos in a suction-cupped basket inside the cooler doors. She stares at the cans for a while before I realize she is looking at herself in the glass. Her hair is weaved into thick braids, like a Valkyrie. She’s beautiful. Bury it. Now is not the time. I should delete Tinder. My mind is like a rat king: ten tangled tails, each member of the party pulling a different way, tightening the knot. She takes four Monacos then follows me to the front.

“Do you need my ID?”

“I remember you.”

I want to cheer her up somehow. I want to be the life of the party. I want to be the guy in Bud Light commercials that everyone cheers for when he walks into the house party with a case of beer under each arm. I want to help people, but if I can’t do that, then I want to help people forget.

“How’s your day been?” Myra asks.

I think of those grainy training videos, clerks with post-lobotomy smiles cheering in unison, “It’s a good day in Good Spirits!”

“It’s been one of those days where it feels like everything is happening all at once. How about you?”

“About the same.”

I print Myra’s receipt and flip it over. I write “Carson” and my phone number on the back. She watches dubiously. 

I hand over the receipt with a shrug. “If you need someone to talk to . . .”

Myra takes it. Her smile could mean anything. “Thanks. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.”

Myra leaves. Her headlights flash on, flooding the entryway with light.

I spend the last hour staring at the wallpaper of the mountain above the walk-in cooler. I’m directly beneath it. Here, the image is stretched, insensible. For the first time, I notice a figure walking along the trail of flagpoles on the side of the mountain. The traveler on the pass marches toward the summit, an eidolon of self-fulfillment. I don’t see how he could remember the way back.

At midnight, I pull the magnetic covers over the craft beer and shut off all the lights. I lock the sliding doors and sign off the registers. I put on my gloves. I pull the security gate closed and pretend to lock it. There is no key. I clock out in the office, then head to the north entrance. The doors are locked, so I duck under the cart bay.

The wind picks up. Everything is blurry. I blink away tears and cover my face with my lapel. My car is buried in snow. The engine gurgles reluctantly. I grab a scraper from the trunk. The hole in my finger aches. Maybe my blood froze into what feels like an embedded thorn.

My friends are probably hanging out still. It’s not too late. I could use a drink.

God.

It’s just that nobody talks about who Nolan really was, only what we wanted him to be. He spiraled until he saw only a recursive darkness in the world. On rare occasions and often while drunk, he would hint at the ways women had betrayed him, dropping breadcrumbs about cheating exes and bad hook-ups and botched connections. He “joked” that “women are dishonest by nature” and “exist to be bred.” No matter how strongly we denounced him, we could not fucking convince him that he was wrong, that it’s not a fucking joke, and maybe in trying so hard to do so we convinced him that something was wrong with him, because maybe there fucking was—clearly there was—and maybe now I’ll never stop thinking there was some other way I could have helped him see that our attempts to do good in this world will not always be met with pain.

God. He would call me gay if he could see me crying for him.

He believed he had to become a certain kind of man—dominant, stoic, cruel, invulnerable—and then he would deserve love because nobody would love him as he was. I don’t know. I’ll never understand why he did it. But I know he was sensitive and brilliant and brave and kind. Forever ago, he showed me a song, “The Art Teacher.” He joked that he cried himself to sleep to that song. But he wasn’t joking. It was real to him. All of it.

I can still love him as he was.

I want to be alone, now that I have a choice.

It takes a while to carve through the layers of ice on my windshield, but eventually I break through. As I put the scraper back, I see a mountain of snow as tall as myself at the edge of the lot. I imagine how peaceful it would be to lay atop the snowdrift.

I would crawl up to the summit and brush off a little valley. I would convince myself that the cloud of exhaust drifting from the highway is a belt of debris orbiting the Earth. I would sink my bare palms into the snow until they hurt. Then I would stay there until it stopped hurting.