Tales from the gas station

You work At the edge of our town, there’s a shitty gas station that’s open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If you were to go inside, you’d see row after row of off-brand chips, cookies, potted meats and ramen. Expiration dates suspiciously missing from canned goods like they were filed off years ago in some misguided attempt to control inventory turnover. A faded “wet floor” sign from way back covering a crack in the foundation by the cooler that has since turned into a pothole. The pothole, a collection point for sticky spill-off, has become a miniature tar pit collecting countless insect corpses and the occasional small rodent. Nobody ever complains about the aesthetic. By some providence bordering on the supernatural, the health inspector has repeatedly signed off on the business, always kindly ignoring both the faint smell of some kind of mysterious chemical cocktail that is the defining characteristic of the establishment and the family of mutated raccoons that lives in the crawlspace behind the grease trap. We think they’re mutated anyway. At the very least, they must be inbred to the point of mental retardation. The alpha, a muscular three-foot-tall son of a bitch named Rocco, has been spotted multiple times chewing on people’s tires and has been run over at least twice, but keeps coming back