Free How to Find Peace at the End of the World by Saro Yen Page B

even more of the light already made meager by the window paint and stickers outside advertising specials. Under the console I find the switch for pump seven where the Beast is parked. I also find a really nasty girly mag. I slip it into the waistband of my pants along with a few packs of cigarettes: I have never before smoked cigs in my life, but Hell, good as time as any to start, right? There’s also what looks like a sawed off twelve gauge, but I leave it in its cradle because it’d be redundant: I’ve already got one. I also take a box of lighters. I’ve used my own up until now but I expect it’ll run out of fuel sooner rather than later and it’s something I’ve had for every camping trip since I was eleven, though I don’t expect to be spending any extended time in the wilderness. Pump on, I unlatch the cage and make my way back out to my car and start it filling up. While the Beast drinks, I go back inside of the store to see if there’s anything else I can use. I find a stack of gas cans, five gallons and self-venting. There are ten of them and I gauge for a second whether they will all fit into the back of the truck bed. I grab some zip ties and string them all together through their handles and carry them out to the pump. Crap, might be faster if I had the use of more pumps. I go back inside, into the cage through the now open door and flip the rest of the pump switches on. Outside, I open the lock on the truck bed and peer inside at the damage: a tool box had become un-moored from its bungee ties and gone careening into the quilt wrapped jars of preserves. I slowly peel open the blanket to find the jar of asparagus had shattered. Good. At least it wasn’t the eggs. I take a few clean spears of asparagus and munch them down as I take the larger shards of glass and throw them away. The pickling vinegar had already mostly evaporated. I pile the loose blanket back on the rest of the jars.

I begin my parallel filling operation on the gas cans, one five gallon can at each pump, even though I probably won’t be able to take them all. When I finish with one, I load it into the back of the truck and am gratified to find that it takes up much less room in the massive truck bed than previously thought. I load up each canister as they finish, one after the other. Ten cans, five gallons per. That will only keep me from having to stop for gas twice. I suspect that pretty soon the power will finally cut off, and I won’t have the luxury of pumping my gas like I was on my way home from work. I wish I had bothered to find out the procedure for manual pumping of gasoline, then I remember something from my childhood camping trips. I head back into the gas station and look through the shelves, trying to pin down the specific piece of milky and red plastic I remember from so many years ago. I finally find it in the back section of the store next some other hardware. A fuel siphon. It hasn’t changed much since one fateful camping trip when my father, losing track of the gas gauge, drove us into Yellowstone on a quarter tank. It wasn’t too traumatic, just memorable, especially when you are seven years old. A friendly stranger in a minivan stopped and produced from all the errata tied to the top of his car one of these babies. Just like this one, it had a plastic accordion pump attached to a valve and two pieces to tubing thin enough to fit down the nozzle guard in a fuel tank. After asking if we had any grade restrictions (we didn’t of course) the stranger siphoned a good half of his own tank into ours and then waved it away when my father tried to pay. We went on to West Yellowstone and had a good time.

Remembering these things is starting to get to me, put a crimp on my new found solitary mode of existence. I should remember, instead, all the shitty things people ever did to me. It might make me glad of my particular predicament. But then, doing that seems somehow to be consigning myself to a certain fate. I’m