The Petrol Station Between Years

Night drives are my job — I move equipment between venues. I know every all-night fuel stop on the east corridor, which is why the one that should not be there bothered me even before it wasn't.

Around 3 a.m., low tank, I saw a lit canopy where I would have sworn there was nothing but pine and dark. Old-style sign, just the word FUEL glowing white. The pumps were the tall kind with rolling number wheels — I had not seen one working since childhood. The price per litre was roughly a third of what I had paid that evening.

An attendant came out. Nobody has pumped my fuel for me in decades, but he did it with the bored competence of a man who does nothing else, cap pulled low, humming. The numbers rolled and clicked. The total was so small I laughed; he did not.

My card was in my hand and he looked at it the way you would look at a foreign coin — polite, unfamiliar — and said cash was fine, next time was fine, I looked tired. I had a few notes and paid with those. He took them without checking them.

The fuel was real. The gauge climbed to full and my van ran another four hundred kilometres on it, running, if anything, sweetly.

Coming back up the same road three days later in daylight, I slowed at the spot. Trees. Unbroken treeline where the canopy had stood, no access road scar, no pad of old concrete — and fuel stations leave concrete like scars, always. I stopped and walked the verge for half a kilometre both ways.

At home I went through my receipts from that night out of habit. Every stop documented except one. Whatever I paid him with, my wallet never missed it — the notes I remember handing over were, as far as I can count, still there.