Hold Up

As most people do, Evan awkwardly fumbled his first drag of a cigarette. Upon pressing it to his lips and finding no greater resistance than the heat and the stench, he hungrily inhaled more in search of the elusive sensation that made smoking “worth it”. The robber shook the gun in his face. Evan had completely forgotten about his circumstances.

 “You in a hurry, there?”

 “No, not really,” Evan coughed sheepishly. “Just forgot about the situation for a sec.”

It really wasn’t everyday procedure at Merri-Mart to talk down an armed robber, and Evan wasn’t sure if he was navigating the situation with the utmost Merri-Mentality. “One cigarette,” he remembered asking the robber, “let me smoke one cigarette and you can do whatever you want with the money.” Strangely, it felt similar to asking his manager for a raise.

 “Well, ain’t you something. Most people either cry or shit themselves at this point—thankfully, you passed the shitting stage.” 

Despite his apparent experience in the sector of aggravated assault, the robber didn’t seem to be that much older than Evan. He was slightly taller, about an inch or two, but his face and build were obscured by an oversized hooded jacket and ski mask—the usual robber attire. His most prominent feature, his gun, stared intently at the space between Evan’s eyes and, apart from an occasional jerk to remind one of its presence, was permanently fixed in this position.

 “Still plenty of time for you to cry, though.”

 “Nah, I think I’m moving past that part, too.”

The surety with which he himself spoke shocked Evan. The thought that he was ready to die sank uncomfortably in his chest. As the cigarette grew shorter, however, he began to take stock of the vistas that made up his life: hometown, public school, hometown, apartment, Merri-Mart, apartment, Merri-Mart, apartment—he was beginning to find that not much of it qualified as living ambitiously. 

 “Accepted it, huh, Evan? Might wanna start taking some more puffs.” The robber lowered his gun. “Hell of a last request, though,” he offered, in the midst of quitting his hood and removing the mask. “You a smoker?”

 As he silently inhaled, Evan was taken aback by the sincerity of the question—and the wild handsomeness of its asker. Both traits were seldom present in most Merri-Mart patrons.

 “No, this’ll be my first one. Figured I’d at least try it before—” he mimed the rapidly approaching splattering of his gray matter upon the decrepit cash register. “Y’know?”

 “Shit, I get it.” It was at this point that the robber dropped his stance and began wandering around the store, raising and lowering his voice accordingly to maintain his conversation with Evan. “Is it usually this quiet around—?”

 “9? Yeah. Most of our regulars drop off before 8 even though we close at 10, so the next 120 minutes after are just me and the register.”

 “Really? Wow.” The robber was returning to the front register, rhythmically catching and tossing a wrapped Hostess cake. Evan primed himself to ring up the transaction, but realized it was rather stupid to ask an armed robber for his Mer-Rewards account. “You just stand up here the entire time?”

 “Have to. They’d fire me otherwise.”

 “Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.” The robber offered Evan one of the cakes. Evan declined, if only because the fluorescent pink frosting began to agitate the burgeoning nausea in his stomach brought on by the cigarette. The robber shrugged.

 “It’s not too bad. You start to get used to the music.”

The robber craned his neck to hear Merri-Mart’s auditory offerings. He was greeted by an electric mumble that he could only guess was trying to render Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” through occasional pops and whines. Upon tilting his head, he realized it was actually an ad for a new antidiuretic. His disappointment was pronounced, though it paled in comparison to the despair now forming on the face of his minimum wage-making hostage.

“I’ll bet. Seems like they’d be some pretty empty nights.” He shuffled back to his position opposite Evan, who was now saddled with an air of dire introspection.

 The words—unexpectedly—hit Evan harder than any bullet. The statement wasn’t wrong; the nights were pretty boring. But to hear them described as “empty” made Evan feel shaky. Empty. Void of anything at all. A sprawling nothingness that made up the final moments of Evan’s nights before he unceremoniously fell, dazed, onto his bed. The obligation that kept him from pursuing much else because it insidiously drained every ounce of his motivation—and it was, ultimately, nothing. Just “empty”. The sudden sensation of heat on his fingers from the dwindling cigarette finally broke Evan out of his stupor. “Empty. Yeah, I guess that’s how I’d describe it.” He blinked hard. It didn’t hurt him to work these closing shifts; he had never minded it. But all of a sudden he felt choked by an inexplicable sense of loss. 120 minutes a day, multiplied by six days a week. All that time spent idly awake. All that time spent in the presence of no one. All that time spent listening to a dying loudspeaker attempt to convey the ballads of a bygone era. He began to feel sick.

 “Not good or bad, just nothing, really.” Evan began frantically categorizing the contents of his life. Didn’t exceed at school, but didn’t fail either. It equaled nothing. Joined a few sports, but never a star player. Again, nothing. Didn’t go to college, but found a decent job right after high school. A fat goose egg. The positives and the negatives were always distributed in such a way that they canceled out. His life was essentially zero. Noticing the change, the robber shifted uncomfortably. 

“You alright there, bud?”

Truthfully, he was not. 

“I just—I wish I would’ve packed my life with a little bit more.” Evan felt his voice crack. Evidently, he was not past the point of crying. 

“I wish I would’ve smoked sooner. Even if I didn’t want to. Even if I hated it. Just to fill those empty moments with something. Something I liked, something I disliked. As long as there’s something, you can feel it, y’know? You can talk about it. This ‘empty’ crap, though, it’s just—”

“Crap?” the robber offered.

“Yeah,” Evan laughed weakly, “just crap.”

Evan glanced down at his cigarette, which by now was merely an ashen nub. He slumped against the back wall.

“Guess that’s the end of it.”

The robber regarded him for a moment, stamped his feet, and rose. The casual manner he had just displayed gave way to one of steely dutifulness. Fishing the gun from the folds of his jacket, he aimed it steadily at Evan’s head as the loudspeaker whimpered seemingly in protest. For a moment that seemed to stretch towards infinity, neither of them moved. Then, the robber spoke.

“Naw, I’m not gonna kill you.” With a chuckle, he returned his gun to its pocket, once again speaking to Evan in that same familiar tone.

“Never was gonna, really. I mainly just say it for the song-and-dance, but there’s just something about seeing people react to death starin’ ‘em in the face that really speaks to me. Call it a bad habit.” He leaned over the counter and addressed Evan with the kind of delicate consolement usually reserved for hysteric children. The whiplash of it all made Evan feel sufficiently woozy.

“I like you, Evan. You lied about not crying, but otherwise you seem like a good guy. So, as a reward, I’m gonna let you go out there and fill your life with ‘stuff’. Find the people and things you like, pick up a bad habit or two,” he nodded towards the burnt remains in Evan’s hand, which the latter promptly shook loose. “Don’t settle for emptiness anymore.”

It was here that the robber removed himself from the checkout line and began to amble towards the door. Evan could do little else but stare in awe at his former executioner’s now sagelike demeanor. Any reply he could muster would now feel sacreligious. He found it in himself to stand upright out of sheer respect. 

“Oh, and one more thing. Evan?” The electric sliding doors yielded themselves to the robber’s back-turned presence. He was fading more and more into the yawning night. 

“Y-yes?”

“For the love of God, man: quit worrying.”

The doors closed on the statement with punctuated gravitas. It rattled in Evan’s brain as he stood transfixed. It was over. He’d survived. The emotions of the night and the words to describe them all rose upwards into his throat. He vomited on the spot. Sputtering, heaving, he looked towards the clock to center himself. 9:47. His shift was not yet over.

“Damn,” he spat. “Damn, damn.” Fighting against his growing mental haze, he shambled pathetically towards the front entrance. Even so, he felt a remarkable clarity in his purpose. He felt no obligation to man the register for the remainder of his sentence. Merri-Mart was no longer a bastion to which he was conscripted: merely another space to be entered and left. As he crept closer to his car, Evan began to think of all the possibilities that stood before him. He could begin to read, or pick up an instrument, maybe go back to school—a bit more pressingly, he would need to find a new job. The fact that possibility existed, however, excited him. Through sweaty, disheveled clothes and endlessly swimming vision, Evan began to smile.

“Damn.”

He drove home in silence. Once there, he eschewed food, water, and pajamas in favor of collapsing, still smiling, onto his bed.

“Damn.”

As pure exhaustion began to take him, Evan was enraptured by the vision of life that was delivered unto him today. He felt eternally grateful for the man who had waved a gun in his face and threatened to blow his brains out. He felt thankful that Death itself had personally taught him how to live. He was elated to finally feel certain about one thing in his life.

“Goddamn. I really do hate cigarettes.”

And with that, blankness. The slate had been wiped clean, free to be speckled and covered in any and every imaginable hue. All that mattered was the intention. When he awoke in the morning, after 20-some odd years of being alive, Evan would finally start to live.