Emily Sean likes to write short stories and listen to Franz Ferdinand, but not in that order.  He recently chipped his front tooth.

Mac's Fuel (May 20, 2010. Issue 17.)

Lindsay Wells pulled into Mac’s Fuel in her jalopy that sputtered with every tap of the gas pedal. There were only two pumps in the station, both heavily rusted and barely functioning. Mac refused to change them, and put more money into repairing them than it would cost to buy the electronic ones that accepted credit cards. Lindsay struggled out of her car and looked into the empty sky where the blazing sun warmed the snow and caused it melt into brown slush. She put the nozzle inside her car as a strong wind blew salt and dirt into her face that she brushed off like mosquitoes. This minor occurrence nearly caused her to breakdown and cry, but she held inside her pain, like always. Her depression was cyclical, peaking in the winter and subsiding into latency during the summer. She thought about adopting a dog, maybe that would make the winter progress faster and break the lonesomeness she entrenched herself in. The pump stopped at $33.76. She went inside to Mac and told him the price and gave him two twenty dollar bills. He trusted everyone and that was why he never made a nickel.

He gave her seven dollars in return and said, “You’re beautiful.”

Her face blushed and she could barely speak a string of words. “Thank you,” was all she could muster and she walked outside feeling flattered, a feeling she never felt since childhood. She smiled for the first time in weeks and drove off.

Pfc. Rick Roth pulled into Mac’s Fuel in the SUV he inherited from his father after he jumped off the Skokie County Bridge. His best friend, Harry Selby, was seated next to him smoking a hand rolled cigarette that he put out on his arm when he heard the gas start pumping. Seven months before, Rick’s face was mangled beyond repair when a hand grenade was launched into his jeep while he was on patrol. He scratched his cheek and the parched pieces of dead skin that looked like orange peels fell to the ground like dust and rested on his boots.

“Do you want to go to Celtic tonight? I feel like drinking with people,” Harry suggested as he got out of the car.

“You want to go to Fatties instead?” Rick countered.

“That’s an underage bar, we’re too old for that!”

“Have we ever gotten action at Celtic?” Rick asked animatedly, causing the excess skin around his missing eye to flap around like the tongue of a salivating dog. The sinewy edges of skin that hung down past his cheeks like a curtain turned brown and were decaying from infection.

Harry sighed deeply and said, “Alright, we’ll go to Fatties.”

A black male and a white female cut through the gas station to avoid the un-shoveled sidewalk. They held hands and openly showed their affection for each other as Rick and Harry looked on.

“You do any chick that wasn’t white?” Harry asked.

“Did you?”

“You know me.”

“Yeah, you don’t do that.”

“You never answered my question.”

Rick remained silent and contemplated telling the truth. He sighed and said, “Once.”

“You didn’t tell me!”

“It isn’t the type of information I volunteer.”

“So are you going to tell me?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can’t just bring something up and then not say it.”

“Fine.” Rick emphasized his speech to sound perturbed. “It was a month before I was wounded. Me and this black guy Washington…”

“I don’t believe it! You’re not a queer!”

“Let me finish goddamn it!” Rick commanded angrily. “We were on patrol and we saw this girl, must’ve been twelve, maybe younger.”

“Was she a virgin?”

“She was twelve!” Rick kicked the gas pump in anger. “We tied her up in a shack where the smell of decomposing onions stuck to the walls. Washington had her first and went so hard that blood poured out. We must’ve raped her for an hour, maybe longer, lost track of time constantly switching on and off her.”

“You ever do her again?” Harry asked, with a newfound respect for Rick.

“I went back to the shack to make sure we didn’t leave evidence behind.” Rick paused. “And I discovered she hung herself. I killed her Harry! I killed an innocent little girl!” Rick cried, with tears he fought back for eight months finally raining down his face.

“Don’t think of it like that!”

“That Godforsaken place turned me into a monster! You don’t know how happy I am that my face is like this because it represents who I really am, a hideous beast, a rapist, a murderer!”

The gas pumped stopped with $60.67 on the dial. Rick stormed off to Mac and gave him fifty dollars and left without receiving any change.

Mac did not feel like working anymore, so he closed the pumps and walked home through the slushy snow. It was just an average day at the station, nothing special happened and he was glad for that, because change brings headaches. He lit a cigar and laughed to himself when he saw two squirrel with mud drenched coats chasing after each other like children in a playground.