The 24-Hour Convenience Store

The store is exactly as it sounds.

Day in, day out, every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, its bright fluorescent lights illuminate the bleak city block it calls home. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, it is open and ready for business.

The quiet pervasiveness of the humming light fixtures echoes off the walls. It is a small space, packed to the brim with every variation of manufactured enjoyment. Alarmingly orange crackers, wine stored in cardboard, candy whose packaging boasts its questionably legitimate fruit flavoring, the whole nine yards. This is, after all, a place of convenience. It is primarily built on availability, not quality.

The cashier stands dormantly, dusty elbow leaning on a suspiciously sticky countertop. She’s barely entered high school and needed a summer job. Daydreams float behind her eyes through her perpetual eight-hour shifts.

Although it is always open, it’s rare for a living, breathing customer to come into the store this late at night. there are far more pleasing shopping experiences in this town. The green neon sign above this forgettable bodega’s door is no match to the glowing Starbucks logo across the street.

And yet, on this quiet July night, he decides to come inside. The familiar little bell above the door jingles a warning cry.

Really? the cashier thinks. It’s almost three-thirty. What’s this guy up to?

The boy, no older than the average college student, has come here alone. He is not looking for anything specific—or so he believes.

He flashes his most awkward, compulsory smile at the young girl half-asleep at the counter and begins to browse. His eyes dart from one product to the next, the pretzels and chocolate and gummy bears twinkling at the prospect of his fleeting attention.

At the very end of the aisle, he notices a small bin of produce, presumably the excess from a long day of customers.

Tonight is a nice night, he thinks. No harm in treating myself.

At the bottom of the bin, I lie smushed underneath a banana covered in spots reminiscent of the city’s polluted night sky. Grayish-brown, I thought. How pleasing.

An apple could be nice, he supposes, dipping his young hands into the bin, feeling around for the inevitable bruises and spots on each piece of fruit. Or maybe a pear. Aren’t those in season right now? he wonders. Who ever really knows what’s “in season,” anyway?

But the pears and the apples do not suffice. He needs something sweeter, something with character. He reaches his hand through the depths of the bin, shoving my fellow produce out of his way, and so it begins.

Ooh, a peach sounds amazing, he argues. I hadn’t even been thinking of peaches as an option! Those, I know, are best in the summer.

His hands are not of the idealized softness I had been hoping for; rather they are coated in a grainy dryness. I let it slide, because I know the delicate fuzz on my skin will make up for his rugged extremities.

After all, what am I supposed to do, anyway? Run away? That would be quite ridiculous, for I am only a peach.

His childlike, innocent fingertips peruse my body, searching for imperfections that escaped his eyes. All clear! he internally exclaims! And thank god, I sigh.

He waltzes up to the cashier, my flesh fixed in his grasp. The cashier knows I have been waiting for this moment, I bet. And I bet she is wishing for a moment like this of her own.

“Will that be all?” she asks, distanced yet vaguely interested in my journey. Her eyes peer down at my dainty skin peeking through his grasp.

“Yes.” He smiles. “I only need this.” He places me down onto the counter, covering my sides with the gummy grime of the linoleum countertop. I have watched other pieces of fruit sit right where I am. Berries, oranges, plums. They never seemed to mind the stickiness of this junky surface. They always seemed happy, even bright-eyed. They seemed unconcerned with the inevitability of what comes next.

I always thought their joy looked pretty silly. We all know how this stuff goes, and it is usually not so joyful, not for us. And yet here I am, with the same innocence in my soul. I have been wiped clean, and I cannot seem to remember what was so deranged about those who came before me. But I will remember soon.

“That’ll be one-fifty, please. Would you like a bag?”

“Um, yeah, sure, thanks.”

I am engulfed in a white grocery bag, lightly suffocating me into a sweet submission. If he’s having any doubts about his choice of me, I can’t feel it from the depths of this plastic purgatory.

Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you, the bag reads. And have a nice day!

That is how I feel. I feel the familiar warmth of being grateful that I have been chosen. I feel like saying “thank you” over and over again.

I wonder if the bag’s signature smiley face is grinning with me or at me.

He strolls back outside, stuffing his disintegrating wallet back into the roomy pockets of his shorts. He holds the tip of the grocery bag tightly, keeping the busy city streets out of my view. I don’t really blame him, though; he doesn’t want to lose me, and that is more important than whatever the outside world has to offer. I am comfortable in my makeshift cocoon.

Click! goes the key to his apartment. It smells of past homecooked dinners and body wash and love; the smells of my other, distant lives. It is intoxicatingly, beautifully ordinary. He places me gently onto a well-loved kitchen table, right next to a flyer for an organic farmstand downtown. The flyer boasts its supply of locally grown fruit, including peaches that look almost identical to me. I wonder if he knows that my origins are not as becoming as theirs must be.

I am flown to the sink, where I am rinsed in a peaceful, refreshing shower. He makes sure to reach every bit of my skin, washing away all the pain and frustration that have led up to this very moment.

I am dried off with a worn dish towel. Interestingly, I notice, its pattern consists of red and green apples. They look very different from me and have evidently been here for far longer. I brush it off, because, who really cares who came before me? They’re not even real fruit! and enjoy basking in the cloth’s warm embrace.

Now there is no hiding the spectacle that comes next. He is intoxicated, mouth watering at the prospect of sickly sweet juice flowing down his scratchy throat. He shoves the towel deep into a nearby drawer, because he feels no need to even look at caricatures of apples anymore. Now he has me, and me alone.

The tattered leather couch sinks down to account for his heavy presence. He opens his mouth wide, and I am on my way to becoming a piece of him, rather than a whole of myself. He takes a large, irreversible, almost violent bite, and I say see you soon to the first chunk of flesh. It hurts, for lack of a better term, like a bitch. A stinging invasion of my hidden, sacred center. This bite is a slow, persistent burn that he cannot take back. I think of the women, years and years ago, who died in inescapable fires due to the thoughtless designs of arrogant men. I feel like one of them, in a way.

Some part of me understands the severity of what I am experiencing. Another is simply grateful to have been chosen for something, anything.

Juice runs down his chin, dripping onto the mesh material of his unfortunately ugly shorts. I am in pain, I realize, as he wipes off his thighs. But again, I cannot run. He wants a peach, and I am one, and I will let him consume me because that is what peaches are for.

At least, I thought that was what he wanted. And I thought that was what I wanted to do. Or had to do. The distinction is difficult.

Suddenly, his face twists into a sour grimace. He shoves his short fingernail in between his two front teeth, pulling out a dying piece of my fragile skin and flicking it into the abyss. He does not respect me enough to face the remnants of his choices and swallow them.

I remain calm, ready for him to take another juicy, fulfilling bite. But instead, he places me onto his coffee table and begins to wipe his face with a paper towel. The marble feels cold on my exposed, shredded flesh. He picks me up, firmly gripping my wounded body with his tense fingers. It feels much different than when he held me gently not so long ago. But I still thought, somehow, that I stood a chance. I thought he would abruptly change his mind, or realize my worth, or some other redeeming action that I am not sure he has ever been capable of anyways.

Maybe he is taking me to his fridge; maybe I am something worth saving for later.

Or maybe he is baking me into a pie or a pastry, elevating my delicious qualities.

I think of the possibilities, the wonders he could be transporting me to; until I am sent falling into a basket that wreaks of abandonment and exhaustion. As it turns out, I am garbage. I don’t know if I have always been garbage, or if I have recently developed into garbage, or if he has misplaced me entirely. Nonetheless, I know, at the very least, that that is how he sees me: disposable, unwanted, forgotten.

I will rot away here in another, more hopeless, white plastic bag, and he will never have to watch. He will not have to see my skin turn wrinkly and gray until it crumbles to dust. He will never watch me slowly but painfully rot away into a revolting shell of my former glory. His life will continue on in its mediocre monotony, and he will not think of the rotting peach in his kitchen’s overflowing garbage can. There is so much to think about on the beautiful surface of this planet that even if he did decide to remember something long lost, it would not be me.

There is hope, though, in this abandonment. I force myself to remember that, repeating it over and over until it sticks like that janky bodega countertop.

Maybe someday, after my flesh has decomposed and died, there is a chance for growth once again. It is scary, reuniting with the wholesome earth I thought myself to be superior to.

Someday, somewhere, I will rot into oblivion. And the second I fully disappear will be the second I begin to grow. And maybe, in my next life, I won’t spend 24 hours a day waiting for someone else to grab me out of a moldy produce bin.