Sometimes the Beast is a wolf whose head brushes the plastic titles and fluorescent lights of the Shell. It hunches over, its shoulders bulbous and shifting under fur like a shadow, whose darkness is so complete that you wonder if the moonless midnight just beyond the gas pumps has pushed finally inside to swallow you. 

​

You are alone except for the Beast. It sniffles and huffs like a dog as it inspects the four-foot-tall shelves of candy, then it picks a Heath bar. Why Heath? Nobody likes that. But maybe that’s the point.

​

The Beast brings the candy bar to your register. It’s the only register, of course, because you are the only one here. It lowers its wet, dripping mouth to deposit the candy, half melted from the heat of death clamped behind its jagged teeth. You don’t scan it, and you don’t tell it the total, but the Beast coughs up a handful of change and licks the wrapper confining the mess once again into its mouth, and it leaves without opening the door.

The lights buzz, and you survey the store. Boxes of food, bags of candy, fizzing sodas lay scattered in the once-pristine aisles, their bright colors harsh in the whiteness of the linoleum and the lights and the walls and everything in between.

*****

​

​Sometimes the Beast is a hideous possibility of a serpent, its belly silent on the cool floor. It comes in that night in a streak of darkness wavering across the flat expanse of tile. There is a pretzel on the floor today, and you know you should pick it up, but you don’t.

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​The Beast stops in front of it and regards it with eyes that you’re not sure are there. If they are, they’re not true. The creature is, this time, only as big as a pinky finger, curious and small and cute, but it is menacing in the way it curls itself around the pretzel and nudges it inch by inch to the register. You watch this painstaking process; the only sound is the incessant buzzing of graveyard shift and store, and of course the rasp of a pretzel.

​

​The beast produces a dollar bill. You don’t know how. It leaves the dollar on the floor and takes its floor pretzel and leaves without opening the door. 

​You survey the store. The aisles are coated in a thin black residue. You go to find the mop.

​

*****

​Sometimes the Beast is a flower.

​

​It waits for you by the car when the dawn is just breaking and you’ve been on your feet for eight hours again. It sprouts by the tire in the gravel parking lot where the plebian employeesare allowed to keep their ratty tan pickup trucks. 

​

​You wonder if picking the flower will kill the Beast.

​Instead, you drive away.

*****

​

​Sometimes the Beast is like snow. It’s desperately hot that day and the AC broke again. Even though it’s nighttime, you can see the heat in the aisles, and you have to stick your head in the milk refrigerator.

​

​Still, the Beast comes. You know it will, because you’re lonely again. It is a single black dot, drifting slowly from the asbestos tile–if asbestos is still a thing, it’ll be in this Shell station. It falls between your feet, and you look back up, because more is coming now, until the store is filled with them, and despite the mess you are as happy as you can remember being in so, so long.

*****

​Sometimes the Beast comes to you when you forget about it.

​

​It was only that morning that your cat threw up twice and you keep wondering if he’s okay. You would have called out, but you need to keep your shoebox apartment or you and your cat will have no more options. That’s what all this is for, after all, isn’t it? To have the option to live in a shoebox or a shithole, to eat ramen or rice, to work in a Shell or in hell, which is really all the same if you think hard enough.

​

​You miss your cat.

​

​The darkness appears again, stark against the white of the back wall. You’re not entirely sure what it is, but it’s big and incorporeal, like the same shadow moving through your mind. But it is also a break from the incessant buzzing and whiteness and purity, and you open your arms.

​

​The Beast barrels down the aisle from the energy drinks to the register. When it reaches you, it is the shape of a heavy, fluffy cat, burrowing into your neck and purring there. You wonder if this is a Beast at all, and if you wouldn’t mind being blind knowing darkness is so comforting.

​

*****

​

Sometimes the Beast is nothing but a whirlwind of destruction, and Sometimes is a good thing. It starts as a breeze inside the gas station that you only notice after a few seconds as odd, and then you smile, because Sometimes the oddity has quickly become your friend.

​

It does not appear as any corporeal thing, no dog or flower or snow, but a tendril of wind that flickers those mind-numbing fluorescents and stops the incessant buzzing of the lights and your thoughts.

​

Sometimes the Beast is euphoric.

​

It lifts your hair playfully and brushes over your shoulders, and you follow its pull from the register to the floor. You only come here to arrange those colorful little nothings and sweep sometimes when you get so bored of scrolling on your phone. But Sometimes the Beast wants to play, so you play.

​

It takes you to the candy aisle where it first went, and gathers a load of Nerds Gummy Clusters, which you hate stocking because the bags like to rip. It takes these and throws them on the ground, and you get the feeling that the wind, the feeling, wants you to do the same.

​

You pick out your least favorite candy. Once, it was Heath, but now it’s Sugar Daddy because they suck to put away straight, and the barcodes are crumpled in the wrapper, and they’re the worst candy ever, and they have a stupid name. They fill your hands awkwardly because yeah, they suck, but if you hold your arms out more, the Beast will pile the candies against your chest. It pushes your arms down and you acquiesce, dropping the candy to scatter across the linoleum tile in a mantra of freedom. 

You look up at the faint feeling and find that the Beast has become a fog of darkness hovering at eye level. You smile at it, and it does not smile back, but you understand that it loves you all the same.

​

It takes your hand again, a faint pressure, and leads you to the coolers of sodas, where it throws the glass open with finality. It takes Pepsi Cherry and shakes it and shakes it and shakes it and shakes it and opens it. The bottle explodes.

​

You do the same with a Diet Doctor Pepper.

​

Together, you and the Beast go through the entirety of the store, liberating it from the whiteness of the walls and clean tiles and lights, the buzzing lights.

​

*****

​Sometimes the Beast gets you fired from your job.

​

​Your manager calls you the next morning when you’re sleeping, but you expected this. He does not yell, only tells you that you’re being let go, and you hang up without answering.

*****

You do not see the Beast again.