Epilogue

“Hey, Boss. You got some mail.” I looked up from my laptop to see the newest part-timer standing on the other side of the counter, holding a letter in the air. “You want me to open it?”

I nodded. He removed the blade from the sheath on his belt and walked out the back door. He was already proving to be an invaluable employee. Even if he made most of the customers (and other employees) a bit nervous. But there was no one else I trusted for mail duty. He knew to dispose of any letter or “gift” from my secret admirer, Roger, right away. Plus, due to his immense size, he’d probably survive a booby trap or mail bomb with minimal injuries.

I found him living in a makeshift tent behind the dumpster with no memory of who he was or how he’d gotten to our town. I immediately offered him a job and a nametag that read, “Benji.”

It seemed as if things were back to normal. In fact, things had never been so normal. But at the same time, a lot of things didn’t make sense anymore. Whatever the Guardian (or the shapeshifter, or whatever you want to call it) did to rewrite reality after erasing everyone else’s memories left some unintended side effects. A few ghosts in the machine. The occasional Glitch in the Matrix.

For instance, that suspicious-looking scar on my left wrist that never properly healed. Or the bearded man living behind the dumpster. Or the fact that I suddenly had a new roommate.

Luckily, it wasn’t some crazy person I didn’t know. Just a crazy person I know all too well. I came home one day to learn that Jerry’s been staying in my spare bedroom for some time now—ever since, as he put it, “The Mathmetists came back.”

Lots of people were no longer dead, it seemed. But considering I was the only one who knew they weren’t meant to be alive, it didn’t really matter. Despite the fact that I’d watched them get torn to pieces, Clyde and his deputies were still around, although the sheriff himself had recently been stripped of his sheriffly responsibilities. After an embarrassing public mental breakdown, the County Board of Supervisors were forced to pick a new acting sheriff. They unanimously decided on the most competent member of the team, one Amelia O’Brien. (I learned a little more about the man who put O’Brien in charge of the sheriff's department. It seemed that the new Chairman of the Board of Supervisors was a local, although nobody could remember anything about him except that his name was Kieffer, and that he was a strange man.)

Sheriff O’Brien, unfortunately, remembered very little about all of the weird and supernatural things she’d encountered as a deputy. This, in effect, meant she remembered very little about me and the gas station. It was going to be an uphill battle earning her respect and friendship all over again, but I was up to the task. After all, I had all the time in the world now.

My new sleep doctor was a local guy. Not as impressive of a resume as the late Doctor Vicedomini (who—I double-checked—was still dead), but after one session he could tell that I was grossly overmedicated for a simple case of REM sleep behavior disorder. My new medicines were working wonders. I was even getting real, honest-to-goodness sleep for almost an entire hour a night!

The gas station itself was back up and running, too. We weren’t turning a profit, but without all the pressure from Howard, we were at least able to keep the doors open and the electricity on (for now). In fact, I found a money order stuffed under the register. It was made out to “Cash” for ten thousand dollars. I couldn’t tell if this was part of the Guardian’s big rewrite, or if I’d really forgotten that I had been sitting on John Normal’s bribe money for all these months.

I was learning new, crucial pieces of information by the hour. The morning after everything did or didn’t happen, Rosa showed up at the gas station wearing her name badge and ready to start her regular shift. But first, she surprised me with a sad kiss, then proceeded to break up with me. 

“I’m sorry, Jack. I can’t explain it. I just don’t feel like we should be dating anymore.”

I think I took the breakup better than she was expecting.

I wasn’t surprised at all when the news broke about Brother Riley. The best theory anyone had was “robbery gone wrong.” He didn’t see it coming. Whoever shot him got away without a trace. Nobody had any clue who did it, but there was a theory that he might have known his killer.

I took time off of work to go to his funeral.

 

***

 

Just when I finally thought I had a grasp on everything, on all the damage that had been done, on all the weird that had been whited-out, the universe threw me one last curveball. I was sitting behind the counter one otherwise quiet night, restarting my blog for the third (and hopefully final) time, when out of the blue, Jerry started laughing to himself. I asked him what was so funny, but he just kept shaking his head. Finally, after I’d given up, he looked at me and asked, “Do you really want to know?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you really, really wanna know?”

“Yes?”

He lowered his voice to a barely audible whisper, then said three simple words before running outside, flailing his arms like Kermit the Frog. Those words lingered after he’d gone, haunting the gas station. Those three words that could only mean one thing—our patch-job on reality might not hold as well as we’d hoped.

Those three words: 

“I remember everything.”