Don’t expect to walk away from such a situation still balanced. At work the next day, your hips will be out of alignment and the crests of your shoulders will ache from how hard you tensed when you heard the glass door shatter at the front of the building. You will walk, each step feeling like your left leg won’t pop back into place again, just like your neck. You feel guilty, hurting when you were never even physically harmed, but the man shot in the shoulder has given you sympathy pains that run deeper than muscles and tissue.

***

The aches and pains will be the only lasting feeling you have for a long while. Every time a customer at the register makes you smile, you remind yourself of the events that took place the other night and you drop your grin, bow your head for a moment of silence to the old woman that pissed herself out of fear when she watched the gunman shoot the glass. But you detach yourself from those moments, fiddling with the hot dog warmer, wondering what triggered such a numbness to ooze from an orifice in the back of your brain to the tips of your fingers. You flex them, white and veiny. With your left hand you’ll grip one of the rack’s rods, 140 degrees strong, cry out and let go. Your co-worker will ask what possessed you to burn your hand. You won’t know.

***

Your neighbor will respond with a solemn nod when you told them about the gunman holding you and four customers hostage on a night shift you were covering for a friend, how uncertain the fate of your lives were. She’ll say “God is good”, say kind words, give you a hug. Something rubs you the wrong way about “God is good”. God made man in his own image, made the gunman in his own image, a man who critically wounded a regular customer and held five strangers hostage for five hours because he detested mankind.

***

In the ICEE machine, when someone dumps a glob of coke slushy into the grate and the top flays like the torn shirt of the shot man, you must not stare for too long or think too hard about the memory of the mess of a man sprawled on the tile. Before you gag or cry again, you’ll open the grate and wash away the glob, and think to call the hospital, ask how the man is doing. You held towels to his wound, asked him to press down first so that you would not have to feel his broken body beneath shaking hands. You made a connection with a near-dying man and your guilt will beg you to contact him, follow him through his recovery, think of his welfare.
You will recall all the trashy romance films you’ve watched and wonder if somehow you could become friends with a man you handed towels to as you attempted to live through the night shift of the job you’re using to put you through college. But you’ll remember through the haze in your head that it’s more likely that you’ll send him a card or two, he’ll maybe thank you and if you see each other face to face, you may share the absurdity of the situation together, but only in fragments, afraid to think of the severity of it all. The possibility of loss of life.

***

You’ll have to buy more blankets, since the old ones with rough twine aren’t going to battle the shivers you feel when alone at night. You’ll be so desperate to put your mind somewhere else that you’ll recall your ex and think about talking to them, what they’d say, what comfort they’d give. But then you’ll be brought back to your senses — if only for a short while — and remember that the very reason you got a cat was because it provided more love and affection than your last boyfriend.

***

Your family will be concerned for where you’re heading. They’ll find your detachment “suggestive”. Suicide has never been much of a thought for you, and you doubt it will affect you after the shooting, but just in case you’ll need to brace yourself, waiting for depression to push you over the edge. Instead of thinking of ending it all, you’ll just cry that much more, focus on putting memories of that night through a coffee filter, tossing out the heavy moments.

***

Going home from work will never be the same again, whether you’re coming from a job at the drug store or a future career. In the future you’ll feel just tense discomfort, grip the wheel a little harder, but in the here and now, you’ll grasp the wheel with your hands, the burned one wrapped up but still aching from the pressure you heave on the wheel as you dart down the highway. The pain reminds you that you are living and burning and the man in the hospital is living and bleeding and the old woman is living and dry. You’re grateful, but you feel the new bullet-hole in your chest, caving in until the fire dies out.