It all seemed so unremarkable: filling the popcorn machine with fresh kernels and dropping in the orange puck of oil, watching the kettle spin and spin until it spilled hot white gold into the plexiglass coffin below. I barely noticed the deliveries growing later and more sporadic, the boxes of Insta-Pop and plasticky Cheez Supreme for our sad nachos arriving half-scavenged by hungry looters on the interstate — that was Dennis' concern, above my pay grade. I was busy disinfecting bowling balls under the counter so the middle school smartasses wouldn't come in cracking wise about how I was "washing my balls." I was scrubbing Doomer graffiti off the front windows with our last bottle of Kleen N Brite. I was watching Madison Haynes' Instagram stories in the back room while our silent regular threw strike after strike in Lane 9 without ever taking off his wraparound sunglasses.

At home, Mom paced the length of the screened-in porch for hours, losing weight I had to coax back into her with creamy soups from the deli hot bar. My sister was freshly eighteen and usually missing, but I had enough on my plate. Dad sat with his face inches from the news, static pulling his beard towards the screen like his whole head was being sucked in. The light dyed his eyes a pale, sick yellow, and he had stopped dragging them away to glance at me when I got home from my shifts. Once, in a fit of rage, I yanked the TV's plug from the wall and plunged the living room into darkness. When I finally fumbled my way to a flashlight, its beam fell over Dad exactly where I had left him: on the edge of his armchair, leaning into the black monitor like it was telling him a secret.

For that whole summer, the sky was beige with soot from some distant wildfire, the ashtray smell permeating everything. Evenings darkened it from tan to brown to black, like coffee someone was sucking the milk back out of. I started staying out after work, practicing reverse donuts on my bike in the strip mall parking lot until the Doomers came out at sundown to stalk the empty streets. Bike tricks weren't likely to impress Madison Haynes when school started up again, but I was no good at anything else.

When we hadn't seen the supply truck for eight days, I wrote "Kitchen Closed" on a bowling pin and set it on the snack counter. Those days I didn't see a lot of Dennis — just his silhouette pacing on the phone behind the frosted glass of his office door, arguing for the alley's money back on paper towels and bulk frozen Cinna-Pretzel Bytes that had never arrived. The guy in sunglasses kept showing up and bowling without his fountain cherry cola and curly fries, but he started skipping days. After a week, I looked up his membership card in the system and emailed him myself.

"Enjoy $2 off shoe rental during your next visit!" I wrote, trying to make it seem like an auto-email anyone could get. By that point we only had a few sizes of bowling shoes left due to theft, so he probably couldn't have redeemed this offer — I just missed the clatter of his pins.

On the day Dennis finally laid me off, we hadn't seen a customer in nearly three weeks. I trailed him, still pleading my case, as he carried the back room's last water cooler jug across the parking lot. He was heading out of town. I expected his hatchback to be filled to an inch from the ceiling with camping bedrolls and boxes of ammo and those freeze-dried military rations they had started selling in the regular grocery store. But the car looked the same as always — a faded quilt thrown over the gray velvet of the driver's seat, takeout bags crumpled in the back. He hefted the water jug into the passenger side and covered it with a black hoodie. He told me to lock up at the end of my shift.

Back inside I used his office phone to dial the corporate number taped to the side of the cash register. Even then, I was thinking short-term. If I could get them to promote me to manager in his absence, I thought, I could keep the place open myself until the checks stopped coming in. But they didn't pick up, so I snapped off the overhead fluorescents and mopped by the disco light of the claw machine. Then I tried corporate again, twisting in Dennis' swivel chair as the line rang. I considered bowling a few frames as I waited, just for fun, but I didn't want to leave footprints on the clean floor.

No one ever answered the phone, and after half an hour I finally locked up. My bike was chained in the buzzing blue glow of the alley's logo: a giant neon bowling pin tilting back and forth, back and forth, but never falling over. I considered making a detour to the Taco Cabal to fill out an application, but decided to leave it for the next day. It was getting late, the air already cool with the end of summer. If I had left any earlier, I wouldn't have passed the Doomers gathering on the main road, orange under the streetlights as they prepared for their night parade. And I wouldn't have seen my sister standing among them, looking back at me as if from the future.


.