text: The price for a gallon of gas is always stated on the sign out front, but it doesn’t really matter anyway.This is the only gas station for miles around. In cities they’re everywhere, constantly competing with their enemies across the street (I always wondered why anyone would ever go to one that wasn’t the cheapest, and yet the stations on all four corners would stay in business) but out here we have no competition and no need to seduce customers with a bargain. We are the kind of place you find on long road trips, the kind of place that might as well stop existing the moment it disappears from your rearview mirror, leaving you with nothing but a Kit-Kat wrapper in your glove box. To you we are a liminal space, a temporary plane of existence. But to us, you are temporary people, liminal beings. You drive up and park and get out the car and stretch your legs, you get a Kit-Kat and pay with two twenties and ask to get the rest on number 5, you’re disappointed at how much change you get back because today gas costs three dollars and eighty cents a gallon which seems high but you were desperate and had no other options. You get in the car and drive off. Maybe you made it home safe. Maybe you didn’t. It makes no difference to the gas station, because you stopped existing the moment your car disappeared over the hill. Another customer comes in and gets a Gatorade, another asks for the bathroom, another asks for directions, which seems silly because there’s only one road here and two directions you can go, and you’ve already come from one of them. One day I saw a white Corolla drive up. It came from the South and stopped for gas, the driver was a young man wearing an orange baseball cap with no logo. He didn’t come inside. I watched him through the dusty window as he pumped his gas. He got back in and took off, and I noticed a bumper sticker. It was black with white letters that read “You mad?” He left and, for all I know, stopped existing. Thirty minutes later, after a couple more nondescript patrons had come and gone, another white Corolla pulled up from the North side and into the lot. The driver of this one was a middle aged lady. There were kids in the backseat. The woman came inside and bought two bags of Corn Nuts, one spicy and one original. She gave me a fifty and asked for the rest to be on pump three. She had thick hands with clubbed thumbs. She filled up, got her change, and then left. I watched her drive away through the window. The car had a bumper sticker, black with white letters, reading “You mad?” Strange. But white Corollas are common cars. Maybe this was a common bumper sticker that I hadn’t previously noticed. Not too strange. I sat behind the counter doing sudoku. Another car drove in from the North. Not a white Corolla, but a big Expedition. An older kid, maybe 12 or 13, got out of the car and ran into the mart. He had three wrinkly one dollar bills in his hand. He said hello to me, which was quite polite. He was wearing an orange baseball cap with no logo. Haven’t I seen a hat like that today? Kid comes to the counter, he wants an ice cream cookie sandwich. “That’s $3.23 after tax,” I say. “Do you have a quarter?” He roots around in his pocket and finds one. As I’m pulling out his two cents change he’s looking down at the scratch cards. “I like your hat,” I say. “Where’d you get it?” He seems surprised I’m talking to him. “Uh,” he stutters, “it was a gift.” “Oh. Well it’s a cool color.” I gave him his change. “Thanks.” He runs out. A man, probably the dad, is still pumping gas. When they’re finished, they drive away like everyone else. There’s a long gap between customers this time. It’s rare for cars to drive by this station without stopping, seeing as we’re so isolated. It’s also rare to see the same person twice, but it’s occurred to me before that it would be difficult to notice. I’ve imagined what would happen if the police or the FBI showed up at this mart, saying a criminal had been through here and asking if I remembered them. I know that I wouldn’t. There’s no way, not unless they had something unusual about them, like some strange clothes or a heavily decorated car. But then again, I would have thought the orange hat and the “You mad?” bumper sticker would have been rare, and there've been two of each in one day. Unless of course they were the same, I chuckled to myself. I imagined two giant factories, one to the North and one to the South, both just out of view of the station. They’d send people back and forth, having them stop for gas, and they’d switch everything up enough just so that I wouldn’t realize they were recycling. It was all just to mess with me. I sat doing my sudoku. The speakers played Kenny Rogers. A white Corolla drove up with a “You mad?” bumper sticker. This time the driver was a big dude with a Hawaiian shirt. He paid with a card, and started to pump his gas. I set my sudoku book down on the counter and left the register and stepped outside. “Hey!” I called out to him. He looked at me with his eyebrows knitted together, like he didn’t want to deal with me. “Can I help you?” he asked. I looked in the backseat of his car. It was mostly clean, save for a couple Corn Nut wrappers. “What does that bumper sticker mean?” “Excuse me?” “Your bumper sticker, what does it mean?” “I don’t know. This isn’t my car, I’m just borrowing it.” “Oh. It’s just that I’ve seen that sticker a lot, and I don’t see a lot of bumper stickers anymore, so I was wondering what it meant.” “Alright,” he said, turning back to his pump as if to dismiss me. I stared at him for a moment. Then I started going to the paper towel and sanitizer dispensers, acting like I was changing them out. He ignored me. I had the keys to the mart in my pocket. I crouched down as if to tie my shoe and when he wasn’t looking I scraped the keys into the paint right above the left back tire, right near the bumper, and made an X about an inch across, hands shaking. I had to be insane. Was this a felony? He didn’t catch me. He got back in the car and drove off, and I went back inside to sit down before my heart pounded out of my chest. Hours passed. Dozens of customers came and went, none in white Corollas. Another man with an orange hat insisted it was a gift and didn’t know where it came from. The sun went down over the desert. I was yawning. Finally, a white Corolla. The driver this time was a woman in mirrored sunglasses. I lost my sleepiness immediately as I left the counter, adrenaline already in my veins. I went around checking the dispensers. Sure enough, when I looked out of the corner of my eye, the car had the bumper sticker. I bent down to tie my shoe and looked for the X. I couldn’t tell right away if I’d seen it. Was that it? It had to be, it was in the same spot, but it looked faded, almost like someone had tried to buff it out. That had to be it. I stood up and looked in the backseat. There was a little girl staring at me with snot on her nose. There were two Corn Nut wrappers on the seat. I looked at the little girl and she looked at me. I wondered who she was and where she came from, and if the woman driving her was even her mother, or if any of these people were even human. I’d say my blood turned to ice but it felt more like I didn’t have blood at all, like it all just vanished and left me empty. I turned away before the mom could catch me staring into the car and went back inside. I needed to sit down. The Carpenters were playing on the speakers now. *“Don’t you remember you told me you loved me, baby.”* I sat down at the counter. My sudoku was lying next to me, dull pencil laying neatly in between the open pages. *“Said you’d be coming back this way again, baby.”* I sighed, picked up the pencil, and kept doing the sudoku. A teenager came in wearing an orange hat with no logo and bought a Kit-Kat. He gave me a wrinkled five dollar bill and I gave him his change. “*Baby baby baby, oh, baby.”* “That’s a cool hat,” I told him. “Thank you,” he said. “It was a gift.