"The Bag-Um-Up" by Kaytlin Thornton
Kaytlin Thornton is a graduate student in English at the University of South Alabama, where she is a poetry editor for Oracle Fine Arts Review. She has written articles for several of the university's student publications and her creative work has been featured in Aura Literary Arts Review and Floating Acorn Review. Kaytlin writes because she believes that storytelling is one of the best ways to both connect with and understand other people. She can be found @kaytlinthornton on most social media platforms. “The Bag-Um-Up” is Kaytlin’s first full-length story publication.
The Bag-Um-Up
The longer Sam worked, the more she understood that the problem in working with the public was that literally everyone was stupid. Not all the time, she knew. Mathematicians and philosophers would probably all be smart enough until they walked through those double doors.
The little bell would ring and suddenly all the knowledge they’d ever acquired would fall out of their brains and onto the black welcome mat at their feet. The moment when people became customers.
Besides, it wasn’t even as though mathematicians and philosophers were part of the regular clientele at the shitty little two-pump gas station Sam had spent the last three of her twenty-four years working. The Bag-Um-Up was far more accustomed to crackheads, drunkards, and the average blue-collar worker filling up before a shift. Sam spent most of her time desperately trying to explain how to use the card reader.
On occasion, she saw someone she recognized from high school, which wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary considering she graduated in a class of eighty people and lived in a relatively small town, but that didn’t make it any less embarrassing when they saw her in her bright red polo with no makeup on, just trying to make it through the day without choking someone.
The misery of the situation was exacerbated by her new boss. Ashley arrived back in February after Sam’s old boss, Miranda, had to leave due to unfortunate circumstances. Ashley was tall, gangly, and dark haired, with a nose that took up at least a third of her face. She reminded Sam of the witch from The Wizard of Oz. Give her a pointy hat and some green face paint, and they’d be identical.
She had the attitude to match. From the day she got to the store, she’d turned Sam’s life into a living hell. When she completely rearranged the layout of the stockroom, she claimed to have some sort of system. Only she refused to explain that system to anyone else and proceeded to get angry when people couldn’t find things so she had to go back there and get them herself.
Anything anyone did was done the “wrong way,” when in actuality it just wasn’t done her way. Ashley ran the Bag-Um-Up like it was her life’s only purpose. Sam thought it was kind of pathetic, really. Ashley wasn’t too much older than her, but she didn’t have any friends her age. She practically lived at the gas station, and she paraded around the place like an iron-fisted tyrant who sucked the joy out of everyone she interacted with, including the customers.
And where Sam spent nearly every moment of her free time daydreaming about a day when she would be able to clock out and never step through those double doors again, Ashley seemed perfectly content to dedicate the rest of her life to the place, and became irritable when her associates didn’t share that sentiment.
When one of the other clerks called out of her shift because her grandmother had died, Ashley hung up the phone and turned to Sam.
“Is her not coming to work going to bring her grandma back from the dead?”
If Ashley was the Wicked Witch of the West, then Miranda had been the Good Witch Glinda with a leopard print neck tattoo and a penchant for pissing off the IRS. That’s why she didn’t work at the store anymore. To the dismay of the entire staff, she was in jail for tax evasion.
And who was left to suffer for her misdeeds? The Bag-Um-Up’s team of flying monkeys. Between the braindead customers and her evil manager, Sam wasn’t entirely sure how much more of this place she could take. There weren’t exactly a lot of prospects for a twenty-four-year-old without a degree. She tried community college for a little while after high school, but then COVID hit and both her parents got sick. Her mom died. Her dad almost did. She had no choice, really, but to drop out and go to work full time.
She could go back, she knew. But who would pay for it? Her dad had chronic bronchitis and couldn’t work for very long without getting winded. Who would take care of him if something happened? Even when Sam asked him what she should do, he just told her to pray about it. Told her that God would put her where she needed to be. That may have very well been true, but it still felt like pretty shit advice for someone who wanted a concrete answer.
So, she stayed at the Bag-Um-Up. It was right down the road from her house which meant she didn’t spend that much money on gas and she could be close in case anything were to happen to her father.
One night, when Sam was working the overnight shift, Ashley told her she would have to leave for a couple of hours to go pick up a box of back-order items from another store. Which meant Sam would be left to manage the store by herself while she was gone. It wasn’t the first time she had been put in this position, and she doubted it would be the last. She assured Ashely she’d be alright.
“Wait, aren’t you going to leave me the key to the register?”
“No, only the manager is allowed to have the key.”
She wasn’t wrong. Technically, the policy was that only a manager could have keys to things like the cash register, the safe, and the store’s door. But that policy existed more to make sure that new hires and non-vetted employees didn’t go running off with their pockets stuffed full of the Bag-Um-Up’s cash.
“I’ve worked here three years!” she protested.
“But you’re not the manager.”
Sam closed her eyes and sucked in a breath.
“What if I fuck up somebody’s change?” she asked.
“Don’t.”
“What if someone shows up to rob the place?”
“Tell ‘em they have to buy something first.”
Ashley walked out, leaving Sam to fend for herself.
She had been alone behind the counter for about half an hour when the bell on the door let out its digital sounding ding-dong.
“Hello!” she said, pitching her voice up half an octave into her best customer service tone, despite the late hour and the ever-present urge to beg people to turn around and go home.
“How are you tonight?”
The man walking in wore jeans and a dark blue hoodie. At least, Sam assumed it was a man based on his height. His face was obscured by a camouflage mask. A bucket hat with fabric hanging down around it made to resemble leaves, like the top of some sort of ghillie suit. Sam’s father probably had a mask just like this one in a closet somewhere in their house.
It did vaguely occur to Sam that it was eighty-five degrees and the dead of summer, nowhere near hunting season. If there was one thing the past three years at the Bag-Um-Up had taught her, it was to be grateful when people walked in clothed at all.
So, if people wanted to show up in muumuus and house shoes, barefoot and cargo shorts, or a hunting mask in the Alabama heat, as long as their junk was covered she could roll with it.
He pulled a small silver pistol out from underneath his shirt .“Don’t move,” he said, inching toward the check-out counter, “Don’t scream, don’t call anyone, don’t do anything that I don’t tell you to do.”
His words were intimidating, but his voice was shaky.
“Is this a joke?” Sam asked, but she didn’t move.
“I’m going to need all of the money you’ve got in that register.”
“No, seriously,” Sam said to the man trying to rob her.
He leveled the pistol at her face. It glinted in the overhead lights, which seemed to Sam to be getting brighter by the second. She could see the robber’s eyes through the cut-outs in his mask. They were blue.
“Does this look like I’m fucking joking?”
Sam was suddenly struck by the thought that if she died tonight, it would be Ashley’s fault for not just leaving her the goddamned key. Murdered in a gas station by a man in a camo bucket hat over a hundred and fifty dollars in cash. Just for that, she hoped her boss would be the one to find her brains plastered onto the wall of cigarette cartons behind the counter.
“My manager said you’d have to buy something first.”
The robber blinked, “What?”
“She left. She took the key to the register with her. I can’t open it unless I scan something for purchase.”
“If I had money to purchase something, do you really think I’d be robbing a gas station?”
The robber kept the gun pointed toward her, pacing in front of the counter.
“I mean, I guess you don’t really have to buy anything, I just need to scan something so the register will open.”
He used his left hand to reach down to grab a pack of M&Ms. “Here. Use this.”
Sam tilted her head to the side, like a puppy had just heard a command that she didn’t understand. This man was holding her at gunpoint, she should be terrified out of her mind, frozen with fear, but she wasn’t. Maybe it was the residual anger at Ashley, or the sheer absurdity of the situation, but she couldn’t bring herself to be afraid for her life. There was something about the way he looked at her.
“I know you, don’t I?”
The robber’s eyes widened, and he began to shake his head slowly, the fake leaves around his hat fluttering with the movement. He adjusted his grip on the pistol in his hand and shifted from foot to foot.
“No, you don’t,” he said, lowering the pitch of his voice. “You do not know me.”
Sam knew she was right. She looked down at the pistol, gestured toward it with her head.
“Is that thing even loaded?”
His bright blue eyes looked up toward the ceiling. The robber let out a sigh and pulled the mask off his head. His face was red and sweaty, but sure enough, she recognized it as one of the boys she graduated with, one of the few who had managed to get into a state college. Travis Wainwright.
“No,” he said, “it’s not loaded.”
Sam huffed, letting out the small kernel of anxiety that had been sitting like a rock in the center of her chest. She placed both her hands on the counter and let her head hang for a moment before she looked up and hardened her gaze at the sweaty mess of a man in front of her.
“Is this about drugs, Travis? Are you trying to rob me for drug money?”
He shoved the pistol back into the waistband of his jeans and wiped his palms on the front of his hoodie, the moisture leaving behind dark prints.
“No, it’s not about drugs. I don’t do drugs.”
“Then what the hell? Aren’t you supposed to be smart or something?”
“My mom is sick. We don’t know how we’re gonna pay the medical bills without insurance. I need money to help with them.”
“So, you decided to rob the Bag-Um-Up?”
“I didn’t know what else to do.”
Sam considered this. When her own parents got sick, she would have done anything to help them. She had taken this job at the U-Um-Up until they could work out a better plan. It was supposed to be for now, not forever. But she was three years in, and it seemed more likely every day that she might turn out like Ashley. A wicked old witch with no friends who spends all of her time at a shitty two-pump gas station.
“You need to get a job like the rest of us.”
“She’s dying!”
She looked at Travis: sweaty, desperate, and ashamed. Why were these their two options? And why was it that no matter which one they chose, they still ended up miserable?
Sam sighed, “The world is fucked, Travis. But I doubt your mother wants to see you go to prison over her.”
“Does that mean you’ll give me the money?”
“Fuck no, you pointed a gun at me. Get the hell out of here before I call the cops.”
Ashley came back about an hour later.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
“I’m going home,” Sam said.
“What the hell? No you’re not, I have you for another two hours.”
Sam walked toward the door, keys in hand, “Write me up if you want.” She turned back to look at her, “Next time, just leave the damn keys.”