There is a staff shortage at the store’s pizzeria and I am shifted there for an afternoon, my seasonal position stretching uncomfortably toward infinity and my arm aching under the weight of the peel. When the others there are tired of me burning the food, they send me to the back where a 18 year old boy is frantically cutting occult symbols into old pizzas. He takes them apart and rearranges them on the floor. He licks his fingers.

“Why are you doing that?”

“You think I’m doing this?” he asks, wiping his nose with his sleeve, “It’s the pizza cutter. The thing’s cursed to cut pizzas this way. Try it.”

He hands me the pizza cutter and I carefully cut a mushroom-sausage into eight equal slices.

“Shit,” he says, “Maybe it is me.”

“They sent me back here to help,” I explain, “Anything specific that needs to be done?”

“Name’s Brendan and you can start by showing me how you did that.”

When the woman from the front pushes her head into the kitchen I’m close up behind Brendan, holding his right arm ahead and trying to guide it in a straight line. After several promising starts he’s managed to carve the crude visage of a goat-eyed being in a four-cheese, the marinara seeping from between its clenched teeth. She closes her eyes very slowly and opens them in a fraction of a second.

“Leave him alone,” she tells me, “Wipe down the counters. Brendan, I need a classic pepperoni. Don’t fuck this one up.”

“Yes ma’am!” he says, and he dusts himself off as the door closes. “Thanks for trying,” he whispers, and he points out a rag near the sink.

I clean while Brendan arranges the pizza, placing and re-placing the pepperoni slices to form a pattern that likely has some esoteric significance. Despite the close quarters, he doesn’t pay me much mind and so an hour passes in relative silence as orders trickle in from the front and Brendan’s work occasionally undoes mine. It isn’t until he goes on break before the dinner rush that I catch up and survey the empty room for hidden filth. I find it in the southeast corner, lurking behind a refrigerator- a matte-black spot with gray fringes that extend a yard in every direction. The core of the thing sucks heat from the humming underbelly of the fridge and glares darkly as I crack my knuckles and soak a new rag in bleach.

“Place is looking good,” Brendan says, his return filling the room with a smell like burning paper, “Mind helping me pick up the mural?”

“The…”

From my crouched position on the floor I turn and, for an instant, an image coalesces in the pizzas arranged there.

“That’s… Caleb,” I say, “From hardware. And Eddie on the floor.”

“Really?” Brendan asks, “From here it looks like a dog or a small horse.”

“How are you supposed to view this?” I ask him, trying to kneel back into a position where the tableau made sense, “Did you… make this for the thing under the fridge?”

“Hell no,” he says, “I made it for you.”

As I stand, a new image forms across the toppings, this one static. It’s me and Brendan, our earlier roles reversed. He stands behind me and holds my arm into the pizza oven. Brendan’s head rests, with sympathy, on my shoulder. My own face is screaming.

“Wait, no. I saw my friend on the floor before this.”

It was Eddie, I’m sure, spilled across the tile in crimson tomato, sandwiched between the floor and a shelf of thick crusts. Caleb’s form in curved bell peppers turned away from the scene on the left, his hand still outstretched from tipping the shelf. Sebastian on the right, having narrowly skirted the threat in red meat and olives.

“Old news,” Brendan says, “They took that guy to the hospital hours ago.”

And before I can stand to grab my things, I feel his hand on my back.

“Hold up. We’ve got to deal with that arm first.”

When the store closes I am lying on my back on a table in the kitchen. My shirt dangles over the dishrack and I am cold.

“You chilly, man?” Brendan asks, “You’ve got some bumpy topography here.”

“I’m fine,” I tell him, “Just do what you need to do.”

“Aye aye, captain.”

Brendan peels cheese from another slice of pizza and cuts a long rectangle from it, draping it carefully over my arm. He licks his finger and runs it over my bare skin, clearing away grease that has spread into the negative space of his design.

“This is good,” he says, “Some of the best I’ve done.”

“You’ve done this before?”

“How do you think I got this job?” He lays out a small, mozzarella pentacle over the inside of my wrist and massages it until the slick underside sticks. “I think we’re ready to bake this in.”

We move into the darkened store, our faces orange in the glow of the oven. Brendan tells me it won’t hurt, but I saw the tableau and I know he’s lying. He watches me reach in between the racks. He pretends to believe me when I tell him I’ll endure it on my own but he is there the moment I try to withdraw, holding my arm to the blazing heat. I smell the hair burn from my arm and watch the cheese rise and bubble and brown.

I find myself screaming:

“How much longer?”

And he screams in reply:

“A man makes his own pizza.”

He does not release my arm until the cheese is blackened and the skin is red. The design sloughs off as soon as I bend my elbow and Brendan howls. He drops to his knees and begins to furiously consume the crisp remains. I slump to the floor beside him and cradle my stinging limb.

When Brendan has finished he turns to me with black powdered lips and says:

“You should probably go to the hospital before that blisters.”

Before I leave the store, he rolls a long rectangle of cheese along my sternum, telling me that as long as it sticks there I will be protected from further assaults. I plan to peel it away in the parking lot but it remains there like a fat leech even as I step from the curb and into a crowded bus.

The doctor at the free clinic does not ask about the gray stain that grows from under my t-shirt as she bandages my arm. She doesn’t ask about the patterns in the burns.

“Does this hurt?” she asks, and I tell her what I realized as I slipped out of the pizzeria and into the brisk moonlight.

“Not at all.”

-traveler

They remove the woman from the room next to mine. Not dead, no. The opposite, actually. She’s never looked more alive than when they drag her out of the room, screaming and clawing at the door. I am already awake when it happens, staring out at the highway through a thin slat in the blinds. I am a few uninterrupted minutes away from leaving the motel and this town. My legs have been shaking for weeks. I dream of running and it feels like flying. My racing heart wakes me in the middle of the night.

An ambulance arrives silently. A police car after that. I gather, from the eventual confrontation, that she is being taken to some home for the terminally ill. Some estranged family member has made that choice for her.

Eddie is out of the bed and in the lot before I even wonder if the noise will wake him. He shouts at the paramedics until the police pull him aside and warn him against further interference. The woman screams after him- him, and eventually me, standing in the doorway- to convince them that she’ll be all right on her own. Neither of us do. How could we?

The woman’s room is left unlocked in the chaos, her door ajar. The sickly smell and yellow light seep out onto the pavement outside my room. I hesitate to cross it and, when I do, it’s only to close the woman’s door. I see the indention of her body on the comforter and the path of her pacing in the carpet and I shut them quickly away. Eddie jogs over.

“Think we should take some of her stuff to her?” he asks.

I demonstrate the locked handle and he puts on a face that he wears the rest of the evening. He’s wearing it at the table near the window, looking out the slat with me, when he says:

“I’m sorry things have been so shit recently.”

I thumb a card in my pocket, a picture of the Traitor, and I scratch my nose.

“Me too.”

Another Friday arrives and we play a few broken rounds of the game before Sebastian steps away to smoke and several others linger, bound by cautious unrest. Caleb is the first and only one to broach the subject.

“We need to change it back.”

Nobody disagrees, which is as much a mutiny as these men will ever conspire toward. They begin to drop the Traitor from their hand, drawing up as though someone had dealt them a missing card. Even Sebastian seems relieved, at first, to find himself lost in the old, familiar archetypes and their old familiar behaviors for an evening.

It isn’t until later, when Diego stands and drops a card from his sleeve that Sebastian sees what has happened. He seems to see them all- all the Traitors, all at once, secreted in pockets and stuffed between the pages of old novels on his shelf, folded under baseball caps and into shoes.

“What’s this?” he asks, picking the card up from the rug, “You cheating, Diego?”

“No, man,” Diego says, squirming in his clothes, “No… Me and the guys thought…”

His move to snitch sets the others off. They throw down their cards and shout about the problems with the game and threaten Diego and try to excuse the subterfuge. They spill beer and chew pretzels so that they can spray the crumbs from their mouths and make angry gesticulations. Sebastian is silent, for a moment, and I swear his eyes are on every card in the room. For that moment, he’s in the place he goes to make these things. Then, he holds up his hand and he says:

“I know who’s doing this.”

And, as sure as I am that he’ll say Caleb he turns to me instead.

“You.”

He bends the Traitor in his hand, folding off-center so that the illustration crumples on its arm.

“You all better be out of here by the time I get back,” he says, and he goes for another cigarette.

Everyone moves to pack up, the game abandoned on the table like a half-finished story. Eddie, seeing that I haven’t moved, sets a hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t know what that was,” he whispers, “But he’ll get over it.”

I should be embarrassed, I realize, to be called out like that. I should be thinking of every reason it couldn’t be me that’s ruining the game. Instead, I try to keep a straight face as pain racks the left side of my body, radiating from the arm Sebastian would have me lose.

-traveler

Sebastian’s anger fills the apartment with a taste like iron. It seeps between the smiles of the other men and it confuses them. It confuses Caleb most of all because he is winning despite himself. He wins apologetically. He plays weak hands across guilty towers of chips, brushing them with his elbows so that they clatter to the ground. We find embarrassing reminders of his sudden fortune beneath his chair and under the dresser. He wins so much he loses track of how much he’s won. He tries to offload it, tries to hand out little freebies to Eddie when he breaks early one night and leans back in his chair to watch.

Eddie knows better than to touch those chips. There is something dark in them, some brooding superstition that might catch like a disease.

On breaks we hear Caleb pacing in the kitchen, his teeth and pockets rattling. I suspect he pleads to Candy and I wonder if she rolls her eyes at the sudden change of heart. He holds himself together during the games, though. And he wins. I make sure he does.

In the end, it’s not the winning that spreads, but the anger.

Eddie tastes blood as we set up a new coffee display. He squeezes each bag until the smell of the grounds permeates the aisle, his dirty fingernails leaving little indents in the foil.

“It’s supposed to just be this fun fucking thing,” he tells me again, “And Caleb’s got to make it about making money.”

“Yeah.”

“Sebastian’s fucking furious, man. I’ve never seen him like that. He’s playing it cool, but he’s real fucking mad.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s just supposed to be for fun.”

Friday arrives and Sebastian surprises us with a new deck and a new card- the Traitor. He tells us it’s modelled after the manager of the old gas station, a man that held all the cards, so to speak. The Traitor throws off the balance of the entire game. Rounds devolve into chaos and money changes hands wildly.

It isn’t until the end of the night that I find the Traitor in my hand. The man is draped in a hoodie, his over-large hood obscuring everything but a gap-toothed grimace. There is a book in his right hand, shedding pages onto the road. There is a wooden stake in the left (or a pen, it’s difficult to tell).

I try to catch Sebastian’s eyes as I play the card.

He gives nothing away but money.

-traveler

With some rough calculations, I gather that there is about $2000 between the men that play the game. The $2000 more or less shifts between players, though the bulk of it sits between two men: Caleb and Sebastian. The rest of us are used to losing a little every night- ten bucks here, twenty bucks on a rough couple of rounds. Sometimes we even come out on top, but the longer I watch, the more I see the money sliding across the table to those two.

Nobody seems to mind.

Eddie stands outside my motel room, his lanky silhouette framed by the open door, breath emerging in a fog. He worries about the woman next door- it’s been a long time since I’ve heard her pacing. He tells me how Sebastian created the game:

‘Sebastian worked night shifts at some shithole gas station, right? Some place way out on the highway, out where there isn’t any light but headlights and the fucking stars. Not the sort of place where people come twice, caters mostly to truckers and families on holiday and people on the run. Thing is, he says he started seeing patterns in the folk that came around for gas and jerky.

A guy comes in looking for scissors, says he can’t get the package of his new earbuds open without’em. Guy comes in a month later- different guy, same story. Another guy’s always looking for some flavor of chips they quit making. A woman comes in to buy gardening gloves every three weeks. Who buys gardening gloves at a gas station? Who needs’em in the middle of the night?

So these people are all different but they’re all fulfilling roles. They’re acting out parts. He starts to see the whole thing like some sort of TV drama, starts to know what to expect. He writes’em down, doodles little pictures of’em. So the Scissor Man, like, the card, you know? The Scissor Man is pretty regular so there’s a few of him in the deck. And he’s not tied to the moon so the card’s black. The Chip Eater only came around when the moon was, you know, getting bigger. So the card’s yellow, like the moon off the highway. And he never finds what he’s looking for so he’s a losing card.

Sebastian says he near offed himself when, all said and done, he figured there were really only 48 types of people that ever came in off the highway. Said the same about people in the daytime, too. We’re all just a Scissor Man or a Dusty Shade or a Gas Guzzler. All of us just fit into those 48 slots and some of us are so common as to be around every corner or so useless that nobody wants us shitting on their hand and eating up their chips.

Only thing that kept him sane was getting away from that gas station and making it all like some game he gets to play with dudes at the end of the day. Makes it about money again which, I suspect, we all kinda think it’s about, really. Play some cards, make some money, right? You in for this Friday? I’ve got a good feeling.’

I have seen Sebastian eyeing me across the table and, before I could take it personally, I’ve found him eyeing the others. He sees us in the cards and he plays us like his hand, pegging each man at the table with his gas-station archetype.

Friday comes along and I flip a hand of Amorphous Children, one of each suit. It’s impressive, maybe the best hand I’ve played in my time at the table, and it wins me several hundred dollars in chips and a few stinging back slaps. Not unexpectedly, I begin to lose again. Sebastian knows the ins-and-outs of the game and of the men. It would take years of play before I was able to win against him consistently. Instead, I try to lose in a very specific way, conceding round after round to Caleb, even when I may have otherwise held out.

Suddenly, Sebastian’s eyes are on Caleb. He understands something has happened, but not what. Maybe Caleb is a Gibbous Dusty Shade. Maybe he’s the Walking Drunk. Sebastian tries to reconcile the change with the archetype and he fails. By the end of the night, his system has begun to crumble. He makes violent, clumsy plays that ruin Caleb and allow other men to win. He pays no mind to me.

I wonder if he would tell me my card and, at the same time, I dread knowing.

-traveler

Something is coming. I feel it before the men tell me, before even Eddie, who is so loose-lipped, let’s slip that the little games we play every Friday night are building to something bigger. Finally, at the end of a particularly slow round, a man named Matthew clears his throat and asks:

“Think we can fit a Saturday game in next week?”

The others cough and nod and scratch their ears and one by one their eyes turn to me. They have spoken of this already and agreed. They’re asking me.

“I’ve got nothing planned,” I tell them, and I wonder if they can hear my heartbeat dancing in my chest.

I win the next round.

Last week was close.

Last week, during a bathroom break, I asked about the ‘Library of Urban Legends’ and they pretended not to hear me. I asked and Caleb put out a cigarette, hardly halfway burned, and suggested he might take an early night. The whole game was called early. I packed my bags and lay awake in my motel room, listening to my neighbor pace and cough. I stared at the white bulk of my backpack in the moonlight and I considered the tenuous allegiance of man.

And then, the next day at the store, it was though nothing had happened. I had gotten off with a warning and I spent another sleepless night shuffling cards until they warped and split. Now, as the motel’s digital clock ticks itself toward a crimson 3:00am, the pocket of my jeans buzzes with a message from Eddie:

‘We’re in charge of food for Saturday.’

And then:

‘Barbecue.’

My seasonal employment at the store does not grant me any particular discount on its products so Eddie, with his name thickly embroidered on his breast, accompanies me to the back in order to ‘negotiate’ with the Meat Department. As a stocker, I am more than familiar with the labyrinthine warehouse in the back of the store- a place that is too large and too convoluted to exist in the shell it presents to the outside world. I have seen, occasionally, the once-white door of the Meat Locker, these visitations always preceded by a stark drop in temperature. I have seen Veronica, the manager there, her apron stained red and her eyes glittering.

“She kept fucking whispering to customers,” Eddie explains, pushing through a wall of stacked toilet paper, “And, like, it’s not against the rules. And we thought she had some mental thing so they didn’t fire her. And… Jesus!”

Veronicastands in a pool of pink froth, running a rag back and forth across the cooler’sdoor. She wrings the cloth onto the floor and dips it in a bucket at herfeet, the liquid there tinted red and steaming.

“Veronica,” Eddie says, holding a box of cereal to his chest as though it will ward off her eyes, “Me and some of the guys were, uh, looking to barbecue this weekend. Think you can hook us up?”

Veronica does not turn. She drops the rag into the bucket and leans forward to rest her head on the door, as though vexed by Eddie’s request. Eddie himself has been moving backward, his footsteps so small as to be imperceptible to the eye. I stand several inches ahead of him, now.

Veronica turns, finally. She is tall- taller than me- and her arms are long and lanky. Her face and hair, where they touched the door, are stained red. Red, too, are her hands, her apron, and her eyes (the latter as though she has been tired for a long time, or sad). Eddie’s box of cereal collapses under her gaze and he sets it back on the shelf, crooked and leaning. He clears his throat and says:

“Seems like They should give you guys gloves for that.”

It’s an absurd time to invoke the capital ‘They’- ‘They’ being the store’s faceless administration and this being a lowest-common-denominator conversation starter. I tried, once, to complain that ‘They’ were taking their time fixing the punch-out machine and was quickly shut down, having not yet earned the right to complain. Eddie, a veteran, derides ‘Them’ in the lull of every conversation. Something tells me Veronica, who wipes her forehead with the back of her hand (smearing the red stain down over her eyelids) does not care for, or even know about, ‘Their’ policy on wearing gloves.

And yet, she smiles. It’s a mean smile, one that reveals a row of sharp, crooked teeth as she pulls her hair back into a ponytail and slips a tie from her wrist, but the meanness is not for us.

“Youknow what They did?” she asks, “They told me it wasn’t my job to wash thedoor. They said to leave it for the night crew. This,” she says, gesturing to the red mess around her, “This is myday off.”

She draws gloves over her red, dripping hands.

“So, you guys need some meat?”

I think of Veronica’s hands as we play the game.

The novelty of Saturday is that we do not stop to eat. We leave great, greasy prints on the cards, we smear them with sauce and saliva and spilled beer. We play a deck until it sticks to itself and will not come apart or until we suspect an opponent has learned to identify the important suits by the crust on their edges or by their texture and smell. Marinade and cigarette ash congeals on the table. The smell of charcoal hangs in the air.

The meat makes me sick, the sheer quantity of it. I excuse myself to the restroom and see my own face stained red and streaked with ashen warpaint.

Alice’s picks rattle incessantly. The bike rusts in the motel parking. The pages of ‘Autumn by the Wayside’ wilt like the petals of a dying flower.

This is all taking too long.

As long as I lose more than I win I will always be less than a friend to these men.

Time to start winning.

-traveler