Minute

By Nick Munoz

I.
The monitor showed all four camera views of the store in each of the separate squares. One on the register, one pointed to the door on the east side of the building, one pointed to the door on the west side of the building and one in the back of the small store pointed at all of the coolers on the back wall where most of the alcohol was kept. The cop watched intently as his trained eyes took in every detail. Assailant enters the building, without even looking at the tape on the door he can see the man is at least 6’4, he is only off by half an inch. The assailant is wearing one of those Spiderman Halloween masks made so popular by the recent release of the movie. He takes a quick glance around able to see the whole store in that one head movement and within seconds has a .45 semi-automatic pistol pointed at the clerk’s head. He doesn’t even give the cowardly man, who slunk down further behind a rack in the rear of the store the moment he saw the gunman enter, a second glance, but the cop knew that he had seen the man.
The cop can see the shocked look on the clerks face in the upper left hand square on the screen and the back of the assailant’s mask on the square right next to it, the clerk had been reading a thick book who’s title was unreadable. The cop knew it was Stephen King’s “Wolves of Calla” by the cover art; it was a series of King’s he knew well for if was centered around a gunslinger, which is what the cop saw himself as. He knows from what the clerk told him that the masked man is asking for all the money in the register. The clerk does the smart thing and opens the drawer, slowly gets a plastic bag, the cop sees his lips forming the words “I’m just getting a bag”, and dumps the whole damn thing in it. Then he sees the clerk make a potentially fatal, but completely understandable mistake, he smiles and utters a very obviously nervous but uncontrollable laugh right in the gunman’s face. Luckily it was small enough and short enough to not piss off the man too much.
After a few moments of wrinkling his whole face as if wishing the situation away, the small balding man looks up and outside and, unknown to him makes a face very similar to the little girl he is looking at. From the bottom right hand square on the television, the cop sees he can see a little girl with fancy black shoes and an over-the-top white dress, frozen at the gas station door. Her skin is fair and her ears are the slightest bit pointed, reminding the cop of an elf.
“No…a fairy,” he corrects himself.

II.

“Oh shit this guy’s gonna kill me”, thought the clerk trying not to look into the eyes of the maniac with the gun to his head while at the same time trying not to piss his pants. The clerk was young but not as young as the over-achiever man boy that trained him at the corporate office. He tried to remember what his greasy haired trainer had said the day they had talked about being robbed. He could still hear that high cracked voice in his head.
“Don’t chase after anyone if you get robbed,” the pimpled teen had said, “just let them go and call the police immediately.”
He remembered thinking at the time what a pussy this kid was. “If some punk ass kids come in and steal from me they better hope they are faster than me,” he thought, acting as though he had a personal stake in the theft of the gas stations property, like it was his own property.
“Remember to use the tape measure on the inside of the door to check the assailant’s height, try to determine his ethnicity, look for any distinguishing features”
“Any distinguishing features, uh yeah, he’s wearing a fucking Spiderman mask,” thought the clerk, and at the thought of the robber leaving the store, climbing the wall and web-swinging away, a laugh escaped the clerks mouth like a crazy from a loony bin.
“The fuck ya laughing at, didja hear what I said? Is there anymore money?”
Beads of sweat fell down the clerk’s face stinging his small, puffy dark brown, almost black, eyes. They fell into the corners of his mouth wetting his lips and leaving them tasting of the ocean. He had already made up his mind to give him the extra two hundred dollars hidden in the little black safe under the counter. To him this guy was capable of anything; after all he was robbing a busy gas station with several cameras in the middle of the day and had a gun which he didn’t hesitate putting to the clerks head.
“Yeah, here under the counter. Another two hundred, that’s it.”
He slowly reached one hand under the counter while keeping the other held stiffly above his head to show the mock super hero he wasn’t stupid enough to try anything, repeating over and over again in his head; “It’s not worth my life. It’s not worth my life”. When he looked up he saw a very young strawberry blonde girl staring into the gas station, looking directly at the man in the mask, her mouth was open and he could see her lungs filling with air.
He thought, “Oh shit.”

III.

“Is there any more cash hidden anywhere else?” shouted the robber at the distracted looking youngish man behind the counter. He wanted things to go smoothly, he didn’t want to have to hurt anyone but only because he knew if he was caught and he’d killed someone it was likely he would spend the rest of his life in jail. He wished he was robbing this place to buy food for his family or to get money for some kind of organ transplant for his dying mother, because although he didn’t think he was a bad guy he knew he was no hero. The truth was it was all he knew. His father was a criminal and his mother spent his entire childhood drunk. After trying a pen-pal like relationship with his dad and everything he could think of to get his ma’s attention (which for a brief time included getting straight A’s), he had given up on people and began only to look out for himself. His connection with humanity ended at the same time his relationship with his parents did.
As he stood there, nervously waiting for the clerk to bag the money he saw the small red fire extinguisher on the wall. He was reminded of when he had tried to become a firefighter when he was 20, it was one of the only other times he tried to change his life. He liked the idea of fighting fires, saving kittens (he didn’t think about saving people), working out as part of the job. He knew a firefighter would do well with women and he liked that too.
So he worked out every day. He came up with a work out plan in which he did a combination of weight lifting and cardio everyday, working out different muscle groups. It was the most thought he had ever put into anything in a long time, so when he started the process he was absolutely certain he would be a firefighter within the year. He passed the written exam (and to the surprise of the exam givers he did very well, because of his cave-mannish looks they didn’t think he would be that smart). He blew everyone away at the physical agility tests, beating out every other applicant and seriously impressing all of the physical exam givers. He even passed the medical examination, however, when it came time to take the psychological exams he failed miserably. His inability to relate to others, or feel sympathy was obvious to the Psychologist giving the exam. After he failed he told himself he didn’t give a fuck about that job, and he really believed that.
“Fuck, this is taking too long, isn’t this kid pay-”
His thought was interrupted by a barely audible yet hysterical laughter from the crazy clerk.
“This fucker’s gonna get himself hurt” he thought, and although he would most likely not shoot this gas jockey he had never come so close to wanting to. Disrespect was something that he took very seriously. When he was a kid growing up on the south side he learned quickly that if you were going to disrespect someone you had better be able to kill that person because if not they might kill you. In fact he learned this important lesson from his friend Sticks, who had mouthed off to the wrong man and ended up lifeless in a dumpster two days later. After that he stayed quiet and out of the way. He didn’t want to pull the trigger though, not really.
So even though he did grow up in a bad place he had never actually witnessed murder, he had no idea what a bullet through a man’s head would look like but he was sure he didn’t have the stomach to find out. Just thinking about the blood and bits of skull and brain plastered all over the window made his mouth fill with saliva and acid work its way up his throat like an evil liquid snake. He stared into the clerk’s eyes as he reached under the counter to get the rest of the money, trying to judge whether or not he was stupid enough to try anything. At that moment the gunman heard a noise, that in his head sounded like a siren, in his heart sounded like his end, but in reality was the scream of a small girl. He turned. He pulled the trigger.

IV.

The only other man in the small dirty convenience store was cowering behind a small shelf of Little Debbie snack cakes. Never in his life had he wanted to stuff those tiny donuts in his mouth and breathe in their intoxicating smell so badly. Donuts had always been his kryptonite. Even as a kid, he was quite large because of these baked goodies, and kids constantly made fun of him as kids almost always do to overweight children. But he could not stop eating them. He became bitter toward the kids that teased him, pushed him down, hit him. That bitterness never went away; it fueled him through college and law school. He knew he would get those kids back.
He did. His second year at the DA’s office one of the kids who used to push him around was on trial for domestic violence. The evidence against him was infinitesimal, still the man was able to screw up his client’s case so badly, easily fooling all the jurors and the judge into thinking he did his best. He went to the Bunny Barn that night, a strip joint known for its easy girls, and with the flash of a few hundred dollar bills he was able to take one of the girls home. He considered that the best day of his life.
“I swear to whatever God will keep that lunatic from noticing me that I will never pay another woman for sex ever again,” thought bald man in a cheap suit. He strained to keep perfectly still like one of those statues at Madame Tussauds wax museum. This man had never been brave in his life and, in all honesty, never would be. He didn’t care about other people, in his mind he was the only important human being living on this tiny blue planet. One night his mother had called him because she was having chest pains and asked him to come over. He couldn’t be bothered though because he was in the middle of a brand new episode of Law and Order.
“Why is this kid laughing? He’s going to get himself shot.” He thought, not really caring if the brown skinned clerk did get shot; only wondering how someone could be so stupid. He remained still, which took more self control than not eating all the donuts on the shelf. It caused him to sweat even more profusely than normal. Beads of sweat formed on his bald head like dew drops on grass on a cool spring morning. They dripped down his beak-like nose, formed dark brown stains in the arm pits of his shirt, making him look much like a history professor he had once had who did not believe in deodorant. He looked over a nacho cheese machine and out the window, needing to be outside in the warm windy spring day. He looked just in time to see a girl of maybe six years old, staring into the glass door of the gas station. Her big eyes were welling with tears and her mouth was open so wide she looked like she belonged in an old Looney Toons cartoon
V.

“POP! Goes the weasel!” finished the girl, jumping high into the air as she sang “POP!” and giggling hysterically at the end of the song. She resumed skipping down what she thought of as the “yucky grey runway”, and in all fairness that was a much better description than what it actually was; a simple, cracked concrete sidewalk, spotted with flattened gum that was once red or green but is now as black as oil. As she skipped happily against the wind the pink ribbon holding her hair on the right side of her head and the blue ribbon holding the hair on the left side of her head waved behind her like the flags at the very tops of castle spires.
“I miss daddy”, she thought after another moment, remembering it was him who had taught her the song and that every time he sang it he would chase her around their apartment. She had thought of him as a giant bear man, he could scoop her up with one hand fly her around the room like she were a toy plane and he a little boy. Her mommy had always yelled at him for doing this but then he would pick her up and carry them both around, and she would scream with laughter and her mommy would just scream that he was wrinkling her new blouse. She was never sure what a blouse was. She did not realize that only 12 hours earlier her father had been hit by a drunk driver and had died shortly before the paramedics got him to the hospital. She was blissfully unaware that this was the reason her mother had to leave suddenly in the middle of the night and that was why she was currently staying with her nana. She stood on a crack in the sidewalk, remembering if you step on a crack and you break you’re mother’s back, and crinkled her brow, tears building up behind her beautifully green eyes.
In an instant she forgot about missing her “daddy” and was consumed with the idea that she was stepping on a crack and wondering if her mother’s back was in two pieces. She instantly got over being sad, as kids with big imaginations often do, and began skipping again careful not to end one of her steps on any cracks, and began humming “Under the Sea”, a song from her favorite movie, The Little Mermaid. She gleefully skipped by the glass windows of what her mommy called the “the place with the filthy bathroom,” once after they had left her nana’s house. When she asked her what “filthy” meant her mother had told her that it meant dirty. From that day on she had used filthy as often as possible, once telling her daddy, after he changed the oil in his car, that he was filthy, taking extreme pride in herself for remembering the word. When she looked through the door…
She screamed.

VI.

“Oh shit oh shit oh shit! He killed her, he killed the girl,” thought the clerk as he cowered behind the counter. He barely had time to see the glass door of the gas station crack into tiny pieces before he ducked, he was down so fast that he didn’t even see the glass fall out of the frame. He was scared as hell, and crying uncontrollably, but he was worried about the girl and wanted to check on her. He heard footsteps, very slow ones, and then crunching ones. He quickly stood up and peeked over the counter. The gunman was unmasked and crouching over the little girl.
“Wait,” he yelled, too late. The man already had the girl in his arms and was out the door running to his beat up white Chevy Cavalier.

VII.

The bald man instinctively ducked and covered his head with his hands like he used to do in school during a bomb drill, only with no desk. He was confused by his own feelings of sadness for the girl. He had not felt pity in a long time, at least for anyone other than himself. He imagined the little girl, playing by herself (because to him she had the look of a little girl who had no friends but such a wonderful imagination that it didn’t matter), being called creepy by the other kids, being teased for reading instead of watching T.V. The young boy that once had hope for a different life for himself identified with the girl. He instinctively grabbed a six pack of powdered donuts, tears streaming down his face, and shoved them in his pocket, instantly crushing them.

VIII.

“Pop…goes..the…weasel,” thought the small girl as she faded from consciousness.

IX.

He was terrified, not that he would be going to jail for the rest of his life, but that he had killed an innocent child. At once all his old feelings of rejection came flooding back like the once parted waters of the Red Sea. He felt disappointment and shame for his father, loneliness and abandonment from his mother. Basically, he felt like a child again. He felt hot tears running down his face and he did not try to stop them like he had as a child. He found himself picking up the girl and running for his car.
“She has to be okay,” he thought.

X.

The cop sees the girl collapse into a heap of white dress on the ground. He sees the clerk quickly peek over the counter while the hiding man stuffs a package of donuts into his pocket. They are both crying. This surprises him a little, only because after all of the terrible things he has seen it is hard to believe there is any good in the world, but he sees it and when he does it always surprises him. The assailant walks slowly towards the girl, ducking through the once glass door. He stands there for a moment before bending down and picking her up. The beautiful little girl is draped over his arms; his head is tilted down as if he is looking directly into her eyes. The child’s legs dangled lifelessly over his left arm and her head is cradled in the crook of his right, her perfect white dress now stained red with blood. Her strawberry blonde hair hangs down, the ribbons in it no longer waving, glass glittering in it, making her look even more fairy-like. The cop watches as the man, his back to the camera, runs the girl away from the building toward his car, silhouetted against the horizon. For a split second he forgets all of his training, he cannot tell if this man is the villain or the hero.
“Thank God she lived,” he thought