Outside Tweed.

So assistant manager Holly’s kid died, like, probably two or three years ago now, it’s gotta be. I think it was he got too high and fell asleep at the wheel or something. Flipped the car like six or seven times apparently. I don’t know. Real quick, though, it was a large earl grey, you said, right? Sounds good. Yeah, but he bit it pretty hard. They said he had enough different kinds of, uh, drugs in his system when they finally got some blood out of him that he probably wouldnt’a made it much longer anyways even if he hadn’t crashed. There was a whole load of stuff in the trunk, too. Like boxes of pills and cash and stuff. It was really a lot, yeah. We all knew Keiran was into that sorta shit, but not like — no one thought it was that bad, you know? It’s not like everybody our age around here isn’t doing it, either. It’s just kinda like you don’t ever expect it to, like, to get that real, I guess. Keiran was the kid, by the way. Two tea bags? Got it. And is there anything else I — oh you’ve got, like, your whole family out there? No, it’s all good. Not like it ever gets too busy in here around this time anyways. Lay it on me. Sizes? They’re all just up on the board there. No worries at all. Take your time.

But yeah, no, so Holly — assistant manager Holly — took it real hard. She got up at the front part of the church at his funeral — and we were all there ’cause he was just a year and a bit out of high school then, so we all remembered him pretty well — she got up and she started yelling about damn this and damn that, damn drugs, damn criminals, started on about how smart her baby had been and how angry she was at God and the world for taking him away from her like that. What was that? Alright. And dark or regular? Cool. Yeah, she started crying and turning all red at one point, and they got her off of there pretty quick after that, and my aunt said something to me about how you shouldn’t judge someone for the way they, uh, grieve, ’cause I was laughing a bit.

The thing you got there, though, right, I’m getting to it. So no one sees assistant manager Holly for a week after the funeral, and we all just kinda assume, like, “oh you know, she’s having a hard time, she doesn’t wanna talk to anybody.” They get someone from the Madoc store to swing by and help out for a little bit, and things go on pretty much like usual. But then I come in one Monday or something, and she’s just there. She doesn’t look or act that different or anything, like she’s pulling cashes and assigning us all positions and stuff like nothing’s happened. I remember it was weird as hell. But I’m figuring she’s just, you know — like, she’s trying to put it all behind her and move on with her life or whatever, and I’m thinking like I guess things are back to normal now, so I just go about doing my job, and it’s while I’m over at the garbages there changing out the bags, right, that I see a stack of those things — little pamphlets, sorta. They haven’t changed at all since she first started bringing them in, either. I think she just keeps them all boxed up in her basement or something. Which one? No, we don’t do that anymore. Boston cream is pretty close to it though, probably. But, so there’s no one around, and I don’t have all that much of anything better to do, so I start going through one of these things, and it’s just blowing my mind, right? Like, its got that big “DRUGS AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES” scribbled on the front there, which is scary enough, but then the inside is just gory as all hell. Like, there’s all these pictures of needles and people bleeding and shit. The writing doesn’t even make sense a lot of the time, either. It keeps changing up in the, uh, style, and words are spelled wrong all over the place. It’s, like, basically gibberish. Like, I think she had to’ve just stitched the — all the writing together from a bunch of different internet sites, because sometimes — like, if you look here, and some other places too — you can see stuff underlined for no reason like it was probably something you coulda clicked on at some point. There’s this whole section too about this one type of — yeah, here — “ben-zo-die-ah-zuh-peens,” where she just goes on and on for like five pages, sometimes in, like, all capital letters and with even worse spelling. What a friggin’ mess, right? Everyone started taking them home and passing them around to each other after a while, and people got to talking, and they all started saying those were probably what Keiran was off of when he flipped the car, ’cause you can tell she was real angry when she was putting that part together. Oh wait. I don’t think we have any Boston cream either. Yeah, sorry. Would they want, like, a muffin? Yeah, we have blueberry, I think.

Anyways, so at first, I have no idea what these things are supposed to be. I’m thinking one of the crazy, election lawn-sign kinda people from the edge of town’s been going around and — because they pull shit like this all the time — and trying to get some sort of campaign-thing going. So I keep one of them to show to my buddies, and I throw the rest out, and then I go back to cash and do whatever until the end of my shift. But the next day, I come in and they’re there again. I really have no idea what to do at that point, so I take them to the back and show them to assistant manager Holly, and she’s like, “Oh just keep those there,” and tells me they’re from corporate. Sorry, what kind of bagel with that? Everything would have poppy seeds on it, yeah. No, no cheese. But, so, that was when I started thinking something was up. ’Cause, like, if you look over the things, they’re all just stapled together and there’s no Tim’s or, like, uh, copyright logos anywhere. But I figure assistant manager Holly knows what she’s talking about, and I don’t want to get written up or anything, so I take them back and leave them at the garbages. Nothing really happens for a while after that. Sometimes people look at the pamphlets for a bit and maybe think about drugs and get sad or whatever a little, but mostly they just ignore them. Assistant manager Holly never says anything else about them to me or anyone else either, but whenever one of them gets moved around the place or left at a table or something, she goes out right away and puts it back over on top of the stack. Yeah. Did you want sausage or bacon? And two, you said? Alrighty.

Okay, but now this is where things get nuts. So, when district manager Beth came in to do the look-over she does every month, I actually started to kinda figure out what was going on. I’m over cleaning the outside of all the coffee pots, because we’re trying to have the place looking real nice, and district manager Beth comes in, and she’s walking around, and she’s looking at the tables and the donuts in the display case, and she’s writing things down in this little notebook she has. And when she gets to the garbages, she stops — and assistant manager Holly’s been following her around this entire time, right — and she picks up one of the things and starts flipping through it. She does this for, like, a couple seconds, and then I guess when she realizes how insane they sound, she picks up all of them, and she throws them out right there. Well, assistant manager Holly lets out this high pitched kinda yelp noise, like if you accidentally stepped on a little dog or something, and she turns all red and I can see from behind the counter that she’s opening and closing her fists real fast and, like, pinching at her work pants and stuff. District manager Beth goes to ask her what’s wrong, and she just reaches right into the garbage and pulls out all of the pamphlets and starts crying and, like, trying to stack them all back up. Did you want anything in the coffees? No, I don’t think we have, uh, lactose free. I could do, like, skim though probably. Is that cool? Alright. So, yeah, like, people have stopped talking and eating, and they’re all just staring over at the garbages, and so district manager Beth says something like “I think we need to have a talk about this” and takes assistant manager Holly by the arm, and they go off into the back room together. Some people get up and start picking up the pamphlets that assistant manager Holly’s dropped everywhere and looking at them all confused, but a lot of other folks just kinda go back to what they were doing. I stick around on cash until my break, and when I head back to grab my lunch, I hear the two of them over in the little nook-thing where the fridges are. Assistant manager Holly’s crying real hard, and she’s saying something about paying rent and her commitment to the company and about how she’s been riding in on one of Keiran’s old mountain bikes every day just to get to work on time. District manager Beth sounds like she’s about to start trying to get a word in there, but assistant manager Holly doesn’t stop even really to breathe, and she starts crying even worse and talking about how all she wanted to do was make sure everybody was informed and that nobody would have to get hurt anymore. I don’t hear much more, though, ’cause I get out of there real fast, and I don’t even use the microwave for my meat pie ’cause I don’t wanna be letting either of them know I heard anything.

Like I said though, all of this was, like, two or three years ago now. Nobody knows really what happened, but the pamphlets are still around and assistant manager Holly hasn’t been fired or anything. Nathan who works here sometimes told me she ended up literally getting down on her knees and begging district manager Beth to let her keep her job, and they worked out some sort of thing where she can keep the pamphlets in the store, but she’s not allowed to talk about them, and they have to be kept under the sink in the bathroom. Nobody knows, like, a hundred percent, but that’s where they started turning up after district manager Beth came through. It’s actually weird you found that one. Everyone in town’s heard about them now, though. They’ve become kind of a local symbol or, uh, like, artifact or something, I guess you could call it. Like, look — see? — you notice how there’s some pages ripped out there? That was the section where she talked about how heroin made it so that you couldn’t get hard anymore, and I remember Big Alex Sherbrooke’s girlfriend taped a bunch of them to his door after he had sex with Emily Bronson or something, and then a month later was when he got arrested for selling dope. Wild stuff. Oh? Yeah, right, sorry. Twenty-two-seventy. Just tap right down there, yeah. Thanks a lot. I, uh — you can just leave it with me, I guess. I’ll put it back. Have a good one.