Wild Hearts

by Bridget Essex

Angry that I can still be so fanciful and impossible in the face of her being gone.

  But the light disappears because the car has turned the corner, and I can't be angry at myself for long, because whether it's a dog or a wolf or a coyote doesn't really matter, because it's big, whatever it is, and it just knocked over two garbage cans, one of the lids still turning around and around in a circle on the ground.

  But the animal takes a step back, and another one, and when I peer through the snow again, it's gone.

  Not exactly reassuring. I grimace and angle back toward the convenience store. It's about fifty feet away now, no big deal. I'll just go inside, get my tea, and by the time I pour the hot water into the cup and pay for it, the animal will be long gone, scared off, streets away. And, anyway, it's about three blocks to my apartment, on this busier road.

  The animal won't stick around here, especially if it's a coyote.

  Wolf, my brain whispers again, but I snort, curl my shoulders forward.

  My feet find the solid footing of the gas station's wide parking lot. The gas pumps are empty, but the lights shine bright overhead.

  I'm passing the first pump, about to pass the second, and the door is within easy reach, just a few steps. In my head, the tea is already in my hands. I'm wondering if I should put in three packets of sugar, or four.

  I put one foot in front of the other, and it's mid-step, mid-breath that it happens.

  The lights go out.

  Chapter 2: Light and Dark

  Darkness descends.

  Instant.

  Profound.

  Cold.

  My booted foot crunches down onto snow, and then that's the last sound. Except for my heartbeat, which stutters, confused, fast in my chest.

  The power went out.

  Just like that.

  It's not that uncommon in McKeesport for the electricity to blink out. We're a poor suburb, the wiring in the old houses is just as old, or cheap in the new apartment buildings, and there are outages regularly. If there's a trace of inclement weather, the chances for power interruptions are doubled.

  I shouldn't be surprised that everything's dark, of a sudden.

  It's just...unnerving.

  First I saw that...that dog.

  And now this.

  I square my shoulders back, take my phone out of my pocket. I shake on the flashlight. The gleam of it is bright, cold, illuminating the fresh snow lying on the ground in a thin blanket. When did that much snow fall? In minutes?

  I frown, uneasy. My feet move quickly, completing the small distance between myself and the gas station door.

  I just want to get inside.

  The door usually chimes when someone enters, but that must be tied in with the power, too, because it's silent as I stomp my wet boots on the worn mat.

  “Just a customer,” I call out into the darkness, and I shake my jacket for good measure, wet clumps of snow falling sloppily by my feet.

  There are emergency lights running along the bottom of the coolers, and the attendant behind the counter has his phone's flashlight on, too. He shines it onto me.

  “If you've got a credit card, I can't run it through without power,” he calls out gruffly. He's the usual night clerk I see when I come in at these hours, but we're not really friendly with each other. I don't know if he recognizes me.

  “I've got cash,” I tell him, and when I shine my light at him, he gives me a tight nod, frown deepening. I probably wouldn't be happy if I was him, either. This convenience store gets robbed pretty regularly—at least twice a week if the gossip on the local online groups is any indication.

  Now would be a pretty perfect time to clean him out of cash.

  I shine my light out into the parking lot, feeling my unease rising again. There's no one out there in the swirling snow. The place isn't going to be robbed. What a silly thought!

  I'm just on edge. That's it.

  But the unease does not die down.

  In fact, it grows.

  What shakes me out of it—and only for a heartbeat—is when I pass the cash register. The guy behind the counter is gazing down at his phone grimacing. Nothing unusual there. But when I cross right in front of him, the exact instant...

  “Ow,” I mutter, reaching up and pressing my palm to my jaw.

  The guy snaps his head up, narrows his eyes. “What'd you say?”

  I stop in my tracks. The pain is staggering, but that's not what makes me stop...it's the way he barked the words. He snarled them at me, like I'd made him the butt of a joke...when I'd clearly just muttered a sound.

  “It's nothing...just...my jaw is killing me,” I mutter, taking a step backward, down the aisle.

  His eyes, narrowed, suspicious, widen. “Me, too. Toothache. Been hurting for days.” He reaches up, rubs the right side of his jaw, just like I had. “Weird.”

  “Yeah,” I mutter, taking another step backward. “Weird.”

  It's a little thing, but this “little thing” happens to me quite a lot. I'm around someone and some part of me starts aching, or I feel a little deflated or a little more optimistic than I'd just been feeling...and if I make mention of it, they share that this is how they felt, too. Ma always said it was because I was an “old soul,” a little more sensitive than most, could tap into other's emotions, pain. Stuff like that.

  It's...not fun, always been a little unsettling.

  But tonight seems to be unsettling in general, so.

  I follow the path of light down the aisle and toward the coffee bar, rubbing at my jaw. All of the coffee carafes are still warm to the touch, so the hot water one probably is, too. I slip some tea bags out of their paper wrappers, set them into a styrofoam cup and begin to shake the sugar over them, working my jaw, trying to loosen it.

  I'm involved in my task, deep in thought. I'm not paying attention to my surroundings any more than usual. My phone, flashlight still blazing, is set on the counter face down so that it illuminates the coffee bar. I can see a little, and that's really all I need.

  The coffee bar is positioned right in front one of the two big windows at the side of the gas station. Outside, the beginnings of winter swirl on, snow everywhere.

  A shadow moves.

  It's the movement that catches my eye. I lift my gaze because the shadow is tall. It's person-sized and person-shaped.

  And it's moving in the dark.

  The hair on the back of my neck stands upright, a little shiver descending through my bones and blood, unconscious but obeyed.

  I shiver as the shadow drifts through the snow.

  Obviously it's just another customer. Just like me, someone wanting to get in out of the cold, maybe get something to warm their hands. This is a twenty-four hour convenience store, the only one on this side of town.

  Of course I'm not the only one up at this hour.

  There is nothing out of the ordinary about any of this.

  But I couldn't quell the shiver.

  I shrug, shake out a little more sugar into the cup. It's none of my business. The only thing that's my business is this tea, and it's not going to pour itself.

  Satisfied with the (ridiculous) amount of sugar, I move the styrofoam cup beneath the hot water spigot, turn it on. Steam rises into the air like a sigh of relief, and I inhale the blossoming aroma of black tea as the hot water hits the teabags.

  Again, I'm concentrating on my task at hand. But I'm on high alert now.

  So I hear the sound of the winter growing louder.

  Because someone just opened the front door of the gas station.

  I turn, glance along the dark aisle of the store. I have a pretty good view of the door.

  The door stands open, wide open, the wind holding it wide.

  There's no one there.

  They must have moved into the shop. They should have closed the damn door, though. All of the warmth inside of the place is sucked out into the wintry wilds almost instantly.

  I open a little creamer packet with shaking hands. I pour the co
ntents into the cup, stir with a wooden pick, place a plastic lid on the cup.

  Everything in me is urging me to hurry. Hurry. When, before, I had no time constraints, was only wandering, now there's something inside of me that craves to be inside my apartment, inside the warmth, under covers.

  Something in me feels unsafe.

  I get the lid on tight and pick up my phone. The door still stands open, so now I can see my breath in the flashlight's beam, billowing out in the suddenly chill air.

  I shine my flashlight down the aisle toward the cash register.

  The guy behind the counter has his light on, too, and when I catch a glimpse of his face, I grimace.

  His frown is severe now.

  Angry.

  Is he pissed off at me? Maybe he's angry at whoever left the door open...

  I begin to walk down the aisle, and I'm thinking about my bed, about how I managed to make it before work today, so I'm going to get the uncommon pleasure of pulling down the covers, of wiggling down under the weight of the comforter and drifting off into peace...

  I'm thinking that, I'm holding on to that, I'm actually a little excited about that...

  When my flashlight goes out.

  Darkness.

  I frown, shake my phone. Sometimes the light goes out after I've used it for awhile, and I just have to reactivate it.

  But this time...it's not coming back on.

  Weird.

  I glance up, and when I do, the darkness becomes absolute.

  Complete.

  The entire gas station is dark now. Black.

  The space, a space I'm so used to, a space I frequent in everyday, normal life, has been plunged into absolute darkness. The everyday aspect of it is something I never really think about. Its familiarity is actually working against me right now.

  It's our most everyday places that can become the most frightening.

  For just one simple, small change, and our world of order shatters.

  But...wait.

  Weren't there emergency lights?

  And...didn't the attendant have a light?

  “Hey...” I call out into the dark.

  My voice quivers, just a little.

  I hear the fear in it.

  I clear my throat, square my shoulders again. “Hey,” I call a little louder. “Can you turn your light back on?”

  The cashier replies, low and tight.

  “I can't.”

  And I hear it, then. I hear it in his voice.

  He's afraid, too.

  I stare ahead, into the darkness, swallow.

  What the hell does he have to be frightened of?

  I clear my throat again.

  “Hey, is there anyone else in the store?” I call out.

  I made sure that my voice was firmer this time. The adrenaline is pumping through me, so I just sound angry, but I don't care.

  I want to sound angry.

  I don't want to sound like a meek, mild pushover who should definitely get robbed along with the store.

  Again, it's a tiny off-chance that someone would have been on the way to hit the store when the power went out and then just went along with it...

  But, hey.

  Stranger things have happened.

  But no one answers me.

  There is only the sound of the winter, of snow piling up at the edges of the open door...

  And, apart from that, silence.

  I'm unsettled. Uncomfortable. My feet are frozen solid, my toes tingling in the chill that has fallen in the shop. My palm is far too hot holding this cup of tea. These are the extremes of temperature combined with my thudding heart, the scent of gasoline that permeates every gas station...

  And...

  And...

  I turn, glancing toward the open door. Snow is brighter than everything else at night, so even though it's pitch black outside, I can still just make out the outline of the door, can make out the snow piling up along its bottom edge.

  It's so strange, but I thought I...I thought I smelled...

  I inhale, breathing in the metal sharpness of the snow, the acrid sweet scent of gasoline. I breathe all that in, and there, after everything else enters my lungs...

  The scent of the forest.

  The scent of wooded pines and paths of dirt and stone and fallen leaves rotting beneath a thick crust of ice...

  The woods in winter.

  I inhale, and the scent of it fills my lungs, filling me up, too.

  I close my eyes, just for a second.

  It's an extended blink, really.

  Only a heartbeat.

  But so much can happen in no time at all.

  When I inhale, my head and heart interpret the scent. The sense of smell, it's said, is the most powerful for evoking memory, and with my sense of smell being a little more powerful than other folks', well...

  The memory blossoms open in my heart, unfurling soft and still in the quiet of the gas station...

  Until there's no gas station at all.

  Until it all fades away.

  And the memory is all that's real.

  I'm with my mother. We're deep in the woods, up in the mountains of central Pennsylvania. We always went there in the winter, when the first snow fell and covered all the grass and made it sharp and lovely to look at. That's when my mother would let me stay home from school, just a single day, but it'd be a Friday so we'd have the whole long weekend...

  And we'd drive up to a little cabin she rented. We'd re-string our snowshoes.

  And then we'd go for a walk.

  They were really hikes. “Walk” implies that it was a fun, jaunty stroll. Easy. But there was nothing easy about what we did.

  And yet, it was glorious. All of it.

  I recognized this particular feeling, before I went on the hike with my mother. I always felt different; there was no denying that. I was an outcast from the beginning, and it took a lot of work to make the kids like me. I did the work, and it happened. But it was hard. None of it came naturally, like it did to the other kids.

  So I knew, even though I had friends, even though I was relatively popular...

  I knew, underneath it all, there was part of me that was still an outcast.

  And, just before the first snow of the winter, I began to feel it deeper, harder, the pinch of it. It began to hurt, this feeling of not fitting in. Of being a square-shaped peg in a very round world.

  I don't know how else to describe it.

  I began to itch my skin a lot, and I'd try to hide it, but there'd be scratch marks at my wrists, at my elbows, at my joints where I itched so hard and so much that I would eventually bleed...

  It was like there was something inside of me that desperately needed to get out.

  But then Ma would take me hiking, and out in the crisp, cold air, in the blue nights and the golden mornings...I'd calm down. I'd take deep breaths of all the chill, my fingers and toes would numb and thaw, and out beneath the stars (for there are hardly any stars to be seen from Pittsburgh itself), I'd feel like myself again.

  I'd feel...

  Human.

  That's the memory that blossoms deep, unfurling inside of me until every inch of me feels it. I breathe it in, just as much as I breathe in the scent that sparked the memory, those good, clean firs and evergreen needles, that sensation of miles of snow ahead of me, crisp and metal-sharp in the morning, right before the sun rises, when the sky peels back like an orange, and the gold and blue of it all look like they fit right in together, the stars relinquishing their rule, for just one more day...

  I inhale deeply, I close my eyes, and when I open them...

  I stand.

  And I stare.

  The snow has begun to dust in on the floor from the open door of the convenience store. There's enough snow near the entrance now that it's about an inch deep, right past the door frame.

  And it's here that I see them.

  I take a few steps closer, and my breathing comes faster, my heart pounding blood throug
h me at speed.

  There are two sets of tracks in the freshly fallen snow on the convenience store floor.

  There are the tracks of big, thick boots.

  And there are...

  I stare, my heart thudding so loudly in my ears that I can't even hear myself think.

  Paw prints.

  There are paw prints in the snow.

  And these are not the tracks of some small, cute puppy.

  These paw-prints are enormous. As wide as my hand, fingers spread.

  Wider.

  My first thought, my very first thought, is of the coyote I saw outside on my way to the gas station.

  The creature that was absolutely, positively not a wolf.

  It had been huge, too: it'd leave big paw-prints...

  But there's just no way for me to justify the idea of a wild animal wanting to come inside a building, one that contained people.

  It would go too much against their nature.

  Right?

  My mind grapples for a logical explanation.

  Maybe...maybe someone came in here with a service dog?

  I glance down the aisle. The piling snow stops a few feet into the store, and with the snow disappear the paw prints. I shake my phone again, willing the flashlight to come back on, but it doesn't respond. If I had a little light, I'd be able to see the clumps of snow left on the floor, the wetness left where they stepped...

  But what does it matter? My skin is beginning to crawl. This whole situation is just not good.

  I need to pay for my tea and get the hell out of here, full stop.

  I head toward the cash register. My head's down. I'm busy pulling some crumpled bills out my jeans pocket with numb fingers. I want to be home. I'm done with the cold and the night.

  The power's going to be out at my apartment, probably.

  But at least it's not going to feel like this. I can guarantee it.

  Tea's always less than three dollars, so when I set the three crumpled dollar bills on the counter, I'm ready to turn and walk out the door. I don't want to wait for my change. I don't want to spend another minute in this place.

  But I glance up anyhow, because that's how Ma raised me. Gotta say goodbye to the gas station attendant, tell him “thanks.” Go through the motions of the stuff that makes us human, I guess.

  But I should have just turned.

  I should have just walked out of the gas station, not looked up.