“Our humans lived longer.”
The sign is large with jarring orange text and includes a crude picture of a very fat, smiling human man. The human man is in a cage, but again, smiling quite broadly.
There is clearly a story here and I can’t move forward until I know what it is.
So to my wife’s great dismay, we pull over. We are 27 hundred lightyears from her mother’s house and we are already running behind. But I have to know. The sign will haunt me otherwise.
The boy at the counter has an untidy work shirt and a clear, gelatinous head. He’s probably one of those Gagarian breeding experiments. I try not to stare.
“What’s the story with the sign?” I ask.
The boy’s clear, gelatinous head ripples in confusion. “Which pump are you on?”
“I don’t need fuel. I want to know about the sign. ‘Our humans lived longer.’ What’s the story there?”
I immediately recognize that the boy is not the right person to ask. “I don’t know. There used to be a human, I guess?”
My wife is pulling on my arm gently. I try not to ignore people, and certainly not my wife (it was a long ride yet to her mother’s house). But the sign has taken a hold of me.
“Who owns this place?”
The boy is lost. His twelve fingers are hovering over the keypad to the register. He just wants me to pay for space fuel and leave him alone.
“Ten on pump 3, please,” I mumble. The boy’s clear, gelatinous face is awash with relief. So is my wife’s.
We leave and are only marginally late to her mother’s house. I am pleasant the entire time, attentive, and agreeable.
But the sign is with me. I see it everywhere I look.
“Our humans lived longer.”
I cannot live my life without knowing the answer. What humans? Longer than what? And what do any of those words have to do with a fueling station?
When we leave the next day, my wife takes my hand. “I understand,” she says. She’s an excellent wife. I’m very lucky.
We return to the fueling station. To my relief, the confused boy is not the only one on duty. There is an older gentleman manning the register. His shirt is clean and his head is opaque.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “What does the sign mean? What humans?”
“Oh?” He chuckles. He seems pleased to talk about it. “We had humans before. Kept them out front in a cage. Folks stopped to take pictures, threw ‘em food. It was a real popular tourist attraction, as far as fueling stations go.”
“You had humans?”
The old man nods. “Kept them in a cage, like I said. Sort of a curiosity. Novelty, you’d say. That sign used to say, ‘Come see the humans!’ And folks would think, ‘They got humans at that fueling station?’ and they’d stop and fuel up and take pictures, like I said.”
It was beginning to make sense, but only in an abstract way. I suppose I would have been tempted to see the humans, too, given how much the new sign had impacted me.
“But lived longer than what?” I ask. “You had humans, sure, I guess I’m understanding that, but you don’t anymore. So what’s the sign for? What’s it mean?”
Now the old man’s face got a little dark and I knew the real story was about to come out.
“Came from the zoo,” he says. There’s unmasked spite in his voice. “Crying about it being cruel. That humans weren’t supposed to live in cages outside the fueling station like that. Made a real big stink. Even had protestors coming in, holding signs and making it hard for folks to get snacks and fuel.”
“Made you get rid of the humans?” I ask. The old man was upset and I wanted to empathize with him, but I’m something of a progressive. I don’t think humans probably do like living in cages outside the fueling station.
“Took ‘em,” says the old man. “Told us we couldn’t have any more.”
I nod. “And the sign?”
“Hmm?”
“Lived longer? What’s that?”
The old man raps his clawed knuckle down on the counter. “That’s the thing. Those last humans we had – named ‘em Bob and Jenny – we had ‘em here twenty years. And they were already almost ten when we got ‘em. Most of the ones they keep in the zoo hardly make it past twenty. So it was, I guess it was a little petty. But we were mad. They had good lives here. Like I said, people threw ‘em food, they ate good, and if you’ve ever seen a human they aren’t that big, so the cage was plenty.” He sighs. “I don’t know. It was fun. Fun part of who we were for such a long time. Still a little mad about it, I guess.”
And so that was it. They’d had humans. Kept them in a cage. Had the humans taken away. And that wound hadn’t healed.
“Still got the cage around back, if you want to see it.”
I did. I went around the back of the fueling station and there was a rusted cage, covered in a damp, dirty tarp. I pulled off the tarp. Inside the cage were the moldy remains of a feather bed. A little metal table. Two metal chairs. A hole in one of the corners.
“Where they relieved themselves, I bet,” I say to my wife. She nods. She’s being a good sport.
I get my wife to take a picture of me in front of the empty cage. And then I take a picture of the sign. I'm excited. It’s always nice to find a new story to tell. A little anecdote to break out at parties.
“Our humans lived longer.” I think about that sign still. And laugh a little. Whether I’m laughing at the sign, or the fueling station, or the humans in the cage, I’m not really sure. It just makes me laugh. It doesn't need to be anymore complicated than that, I suppose.
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