Our Constellations
Copyright 2016, 2017 by Roman Theodore Brandt
Table of Contents
Our Constellations
About the Author
Dedication
Our Constellations
The first time I saw him, he was a ghost in aisle seven, somewhere between the cereal and the oatmeal. He was a pale, beautiful boy in a black hoodie, looking at the doors to the back room like they were a passage to Andromeda. I stood with my mop, not mopping, water pooling at my feet. His cart was piled high with boxes of cereal, all the same kind.
I almost said something like “are you lost?” But he disappeared around the corner into the next aisle. I left my mop and bucket for a minute to peek around the corner, but he was gone.
On my break, I talked to Jenny at the register. “You see that weird kid in here earlier?”
She smacked her gum and sighed. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“He was so weird.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t see anyone, babe.”
I looked around at the cigarettes, the bread at the end of the checkout lanes, the toilet paper behind us. “You didn’t see anyone?”
“God damn it, Wade. Get out of here. I need to count down my drawer.”
I went back to my routine after break, mopping the back room and straightening the shelves. Jenny crackled over the loudspeaker after the doors were locked. “Wade, get up here or I’m going to lock you in.”
The walk home was cold. The white, crystalized desert of the parking lot gave way to the narrow, frozen, defensive looking storefronts of downtown. I looked down at my feet making holes in the snow.
Home was a little rented room above the theater, a dirty little space with a bathroom attached and an apartment stove and a dorm fridge in one corner, a place where I could hear the movies echoing up the stairs behind me. Downstairs, music swelled into tidal waves behind the walls of the stairway, echoing in the hallway outside the door, and I thought of the strange boy again, with the cart full of cereal. He was familiar, a stranger who looked like someone I couldn’t quite remember. I remembered his eyes staring at the doors to the back of the store, and I tried to imagine what his name might be. The street below me was cold and deserted, heaped with snow. I stood for a long time at my window, staring out over the roof tops toward the snowy parking lot I had just come from, thinking of his face.
He was there the next night too, fifteen minutes before we closed, a shadow of a person in the personal hygiene aisle with a cart full of deodorant sticks. He looked right at me this time, and his eyes were the color of the night sky outside, black and full of constellations.
“Can I help you?” I asked him, and he smiled, staring at me.
He stood there like a weirdo, one hand on the cart handle, staring at me while I pushed the mop bucket around the corner. I saw him again, a few aisles over in the frozen food.
“Are there restrooms?” He asked me, and there was something vaguely foreign about the way he talked, but it wasn’t an accent. Not one that I had ever heard, anyway.
“Restrooms,” I said.
“Where are they?” he asked, his starry eyes boring holes into me.
Galaxies unfolded in the space between his question and my response, backlit by the florescent ice on the microwave pizzas.
“They’re in the back,” I said. I motioned toward the backroom doors at the end of the cereal aisle, and he turned to look.
“Thank you,” he said, and something about his voice was so familiar, like radio waves echoing from a star system I had learned about back in high school.
The loudspeaker crackled with Jenny’s monotone, disinterested voice. “Wade, get up here.”
The boy smiled again, still staring at the backroom doors. “I won’t keep you,” he said, and he began, slowly, to push his weird heaping cart toward the restrooms.
At the front, Jenny said, “It’s my break. Cover me.”
She didn’t wait for me to answer. She went outside to smoke, so I was stuck on register until she came back. I watched for the boy in the black hoodie, but he never checked out. Jenny came back in and locked the doors. “Here, pull my drawer out of there,” she said, tossing me the key.
“You see anyone tonight?”
She narrowed her eyes at me as she came around the counter. “Pop the drawer, Wade.”
I opened the drawer and pulled the drawer out, setting it on the counter. “He was here again.”
“Oh, Mister Creeps-a-lot?” She chuckled a little as she took the key back and grabbed the drawer. “Go get ready to get out of here. Ten minutes or you’re sleeping in the walk-in.”
I found myself at the doors to the back, running my fingers along the cereal shelves. After a minute, I pushed one of the doors open, peering in at the florescent prison lighting of the back room, and then down the long hallway to the restrooms. “We’re closing,” I said, my voice echoing down the hall.
There was no answer, no sound, not even a toilet flushing. The door to the men’s room groaned when I pushed it open, and it smelled like the urinal deodorizer tablets. The room was quiet. “We’re closing,” I said to the empty stalls. Inside the last stall, the big one, was the cart piled high with deodorant sticks.
When I finally made it up to the front of the store, Jenny already had her coat on. “Come on, I’m dying here,” she said.