Timeless Tissa

• Notes From Elsewhere •

On the road between Cortez and Moab, in a landscape powdered with dust and revelation, I pulled in at a Maverik station to fill the tank and obtain two necessities: a large coffee and a packet of BonFire Beef Jerky, which, in that particular moment, struck me as both essential and transcendent.

Inside, the store buzzed with its usual symphony: humming refrigeration units, fluorescent lighting at war with the sun, a rack of souvenir magnets shaped like the Delicate Arch.

I queued up. When it was my turn, the cashier—Tissa, if memory serves—glanced up from her register and held aloft my packet of jerky with the solemnity of a high priestess revealing an oracle.

“Now this,” she said, eyes bright, “is great jerky. Good choice. And a large coffee—okay…”

She punched the keys with a deftness that suggested long practice or divine possession.

“Your total is eight twenty-three.”

That was when it happened.

The air around the checkout seemed to hush—as though some unseen hand had drawn a velvet curtain across the prosaic theatre of the convenience store—and Tissa met my gaze. Not the passing glance of transactional necessity, but a deliberate, lingering look: sustained, unblinking, charged with the kind of meaning that makes poets abandon their meals and dogs stand up at attention.

In that impossible instant, she delivered a message—not in words, but in some perfect, ancient language of knowing:

I’m here because I knew you would show up right about now. Your nostalgia will always serve you well. I’m a guardian”

I handed her a twenty.

“Out of twenty,” she repeated, as she opened the drawer and began to count back the change.

“Eight twenty-three out of twenty,” she said, pressing the coins into my palm—two pennies first, “twenty-four, twenty-five, and seventy-five cents is nine, and a one makes ten and ten is twenty.”

And as she said it, it was 1959. Somewhere in small-town America, the air smelled faintly of Brylcreem and screen doors.

Another long glance. Another transmission.

You’ll hear from me again.

Then the veil lifted. The refrigerated units resumed their drone. Someone behind me coughed. The man at Pump 6 wanted two packs of Marlboros and some chewing gum. Tissa turned her attention past my shoulder with the ease of a priestess concluding a rite.

“Next? How’re doin’ today?”

I picked up my BonFire jerky and the coffee, now gone tepid with mysticism, and stepped back into the Utah sun, which, I noted, was the exact colour of her eyes.

––RHS