there are three gas stations : the chips gas station, the candy gas station, and the brains gas station. a four block cut of westbound grand blvd the stations rook line, between them a high school, the towering vacant Lee Plaza, the two motels, the diaper lot, walled to the south by the interstates deep drop and north by thicks of residential zones reclaimed in plant, shrub, clotted up tick grasses and trash of unclear age and origin – northern neighborhoods abandoned and occupied alike until joy rd splits it with blooms of fast food and mechanic garages and shells of outlet strips boarded up years now. the brains gas station is the last thing due west before the forked knot of access ramps and pedestrian overpasses, then the section 8 housing projects down further still.
across from the halfway houses on the downtown end, the chips gas station has the most chips and so is called the chips gas station, but the candy gas station has the best chips. the candy station has the best candy as well, two for a dollar king sizes of rotating stock that im watchful for though their ebt reader rarely works. not only the king sizes but several dedicated endcaps and a half aisle to gummies –national standards greatly outnumbered by regional brands, locally made worms and bears and other shapes and no difference beyond visible form and density and coating, because here converges the factories of greater michigan, vast corn fields scoured then milled with abstracted manufacture until a viscous syrup not unlike blood plasma, something of shellac and nectar and of some guise of primordial retching so something stirs like of miracle at first impressed, and then kilned to foods to grow fat on but that yet still starve; some temporal provender that only fills – a horrible wonder to be sure, these and other flinty wonders, the atrocity of man. and the candy station sits almost a cordon, a trapezoid of west grand and grand river and dexter and lothrop, half the candy station and its bright floods spreading the flat hanging awning over the fuel pumps and lot and of course the green eye of the siren winking in turns, and the other half the bunker-like building of freds store and the takeout only seafood chicken place – which are not connected except by joined wall and back parking lot thats bordered in daisy chained chainlink appearing patchwork as sections veer to undecided biases and lean twisted and bent ridiculous and rust worked and like new interchangeably because sheaves of fencing are replaced as needed and its tops all lined in hinky dull rounded razorwire and all the windows of the building itself have iron plates welded into place letting in no natural light save for the windows on the doors and the doorways all have garage doors installed overhead coiled like snails and padlocks shunted into immovable charms hang and they rattle and come crashing down at closing time, and the hideous sound an imitation of a great jailer acting detention writs, but then the night goes on.
the brains gas station used to be called the drinks gas station because it has the best and the most drinks but now its called the brains gas station because two halloweens back a kid blew a guys brains all across the store. we didnt hear the shot or even really the screams of the crowd. days later, pressured and pulled into the western union office, i saw freds security footage and saw what fred had seen : opposite over grand river, the tops of heads, like the tops of matchsticks, crowns and crowns cast in so many shin high headlight beams and head crowns brightened by canopy lamps from above so to pure white dots in the greyscale cctv and the shadows beneath complicated blankets of roiling outlines and murked geometry, the partying crowd right as the sun is gone and the city glows itself, clotted eighty or so they ripple when the gun is fired within the station and they pull closer to the storefronts plate windows like drawstringed for a moment while those in the gas station proper puncture through the throng in straying and quick beams like comets or ghostly orbs dinging from the cameras sight, motherfuckers hustling and not looking back and the kid among them, and the front ranks of the horde see the gore up the walls and the body with the head like a wrung out rag and the pumping pool of blood, and like bellringers subject to automatic and prime duty they turn behind to their number – neighbors and cousins and coworkers and friends brothers and their aunts and celebrators and collaborators and more and more and nearly every costumed and every open to the parties across the city to come, but now each face blank from shock or from some instinct internal being dug out, perhaps an intuition immutable and shared by all beings – and whatever that vanguard reports to the crowd sends the mass outward toward the closest shelter, right there across grand river to freds store where fred watches from a swann bullet cam mounted to the sheet metal roof skirts hovering the fanlight and westfaced door, the mob rushing and cars skate to sideways stops on all sides throwing brilliant bluepale light streaks from headlights onto the flanks of the fleeing giving the scene the appearance of photographs continuing on with their timelines but trapped in the harsh burst of flash and the mob routs briefly at obstacles – telephone poles, the bus stop enclosure, traffic signs and parked traffic, hydrants and metal transformer boxes, people – and they move as a raft being ripped to driftwood before rapids and they all coming disappear below the images frame, placing them short of ten meters from crashing into freds store.
David Gladfelter lives with his husband and their five cats in a very damaged house in detroit. He has no job or other prospects.
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