A strand of bells jingled softly under the mechanical hum of the convenience store’s industrial air conditioner and alerted the working attendant to a new customer.  He leaned over the counter with a heavily gnawed snared in between his teeth, and looked to the front door to see the glass door shut soundlessly.  He stood upright and adjusted his two tone red and white trucker’s cap as he looked around the store.  There was nobody there.  He looked up to the mirrors bolted in the upper corners of the store thinking the customer was in the back, but again saw nothing.  He mindlessly pulled the pencil from his mouth and slid it behind his ear, and in a voice that cracked slightly as he spoke he asked, “Hello?”

Roger tilted the rearview mirror toward him and it fell off its hinge with a squeak.

“Damn car,” he mumbled to himself as he held the mirror up to his face and turned back and forth to see how bad he looked.  His face was stained rouge from the blood that caked on his face from his wound.  He gently unclasped the belt and let the makeshift bandage fall into his lap.  The cut was deep, but the bleeding had stopped for now.  He dabbed around the wound with the sleeve of his shirt and wiped off as much blood as he could.  It was no use, the blood had caked in the deep set wrinkles forming a bloody roadmap on his face.

“When did you turn eighty?” he asked himself as he pulled the skin under his eye down and watched it slowly crawl back up to its starting position.  He watched as he traced the fully receded hairline with the mirror and noticed that his hair had now become so thin he could see his scalp through thin strands of white.

“The doctor said this would happen,” he said to himself as he brought the mirror back to his face.  The whites of his eyes were now stained a dull yellow, just like the rest of his skin, and was slowly bleeding into his once deep blue irises.  He gently rested the mirror on the middle seat and forced a gnarled hand in between the cushions.

The store clerk slowly moved around the back of the counter near the cigarettes and hard liquor as he looked for who entered.  He searched the reflections of the drink refrigerators that lined the back of the store looking for some evidence.  After a moment of staring he noticed on the third door to the right something was starting to frost on the door, they looked like small handprints.  He stood in such a deep concentration that he almost jumped out of his skin when he heard a soft voice say, “Hello”.

He let out a quick shout and turned back to the register with his hand grasping his beating heart.  A small girl stood at the counter, a box of bandages resting in front of her.

“Oh hello,” he said with a relieved smile, “I didn’t see you come in.  I thought I was starting to imagine things.”

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