Entry One Hundred Four: Adam Mahoney, You Just Won!

[This entry is the current story I am working on. This is thirty-four of who knows how many will be posted. Enjoy it while it lasts...]

The day after he finished painting the outside of his house, Adam was driving to the school for his afternoon workout when the Volvo pinged, alerting him it needed some fuel. He was surprised how long he had driven on that one tank although one stretch of time he had been immobile on the sofa watching movies. All the other driving was short bursts around town and he wasn’t burning much gasoline with that schedule. He pulled into Olsen’s food mart again, confident because it was his second visit and he knew the ins and outs of filling his car’s tank. As he pulled his credit card out of his wallet and prepared to faux pay, he noticed a handwritten sign taped to the handle. He was at a different pump, one aisle over from his first visit, and although a similar sign may have been taped to the original pump, he had no recollection of seeing it before. The sign said, “Pre-pay with cash.” Adam smiled and said, “Damn, that makes a whole lot more sense than using my card.” He walked across the parking lot and entered the store, greeted by the acrid smell of black, squishy bananas, one of the few things the Olsen’s sold without preservatives. He pulled his shirt up to right below his eyes, trying to filter the air filling his nostrils, and started looking behind the cash register for the buttons to manipulate the gas payment. He found a box that looked like a separate register but with fewer numbers, all corresponding to the individual gas pumps. He craned his neck to see what the number was of the pump the Volvo was parked next to and then turned and selected number four on the register. Another space lit up and displayed a dollar sign so he punched in “20.00” using the small keypad at the bottom of the interface. When he returned to his car the pump had turned on and the LED readout was instructing him to make a selection and begin fueling. “Nice. No sense going in debt if I don’t have to.” The last man standing on the face of earth owed no one.

All words and images ©2007/J. Colle