Dante and Randall are at the video store. They’ve always been at the video store, after all.

Except, right now they’re in the Quik Stop. Dante is restocking the shelves, even if the bones of his fingers keep getting stuck between the railings. Sometimes one runs away and hides behind the cans. They’ve been doing that more since the rest of their organs, skin, and muscle tissue withered away.

Except, they don’t use the names Dante and Randall anymore. You can still tell who’s
who by the shaggy sweater and the backwards ballcap, but without vocal cords, the skeletons don’t have much need for vocal names anymore.

Except, it isn’t really a video store anymore. The two skeletons continue their dance of picking tapes up and putting them on shelves, playing them to draw in wanderers off the street, and rewinding the ones that weren’t rewound by the customers. The Randall-shaped skeleton would probably still be talking about Star Wars and how tragic the whole thing is when played backwards if he still could.

Except, they don’t really know what year it is. The Dante-shaped skeleton doesn’t remember dying, but he does remember having a funeral, and remembers how sad everyone was before he arose again from the crumbling sands of the weathered cemetery. He remembers shaking the dust from his skull, and how strange it was to be conscious of the feeling of his old sweater covering his bones.

Except, the street outside the Quik-E-Mart is barren. Bob and Jay are long gone, and the Dante and Randall-shaped skeletons don’t know where. The remains of the suburban New Jersey mini-mall are mostly no more as well, save for the little shack that houses the Quik Stop and the video store. It’s a quiet desert as far as the eye can see, except their little box.

Except, the tapes all need to be rewound. The Dante and Randall-shaped skeletons might do this forever. They wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Ben Shahon is the author of the chapbooks A Collection for No One to Read and Short Relief. His work has appeared recently in such magazines as Ghost Parachute, BULL, and Roi Faienant Press, and he’s the founding EIC of JAKE. Ben currently pushes pencils at a corpo day job on the border of LA and Orange Counties, where he lives.