legends · 5 min read ·
Stock Check
A night stocktaker keeps counting a jar of honey that her store has never sold.
The Dunmore Market on Sable Road closed at ten. At ten-fifteen Haruka Vance was still in aisle nine with a clipboard and a handheld scanner, counting tins of peaches.
Nobody had asked her to count. The night manager wanted the weekly stock check finished by Monday, and it was a box to tick for the regional office. But Haruka had worked nights for three years, and she liked the store after the last customer left. The tubes hummed in one steady key. The freezer doors breathed. She could walk the length of the building and hear her own shoes on the vinyl.
Forty-two peaches. The sheet said forty-two.
Aisle ten, tinned tomatoes, forty-eight. Pasta, sixty-one. Both right.
The trouble was always at the end of the sheet, where her attention wandered.
Aisle eleven was baking. Flour in ten-kilo sacks, sugar in paper bags, a shelf of dried yeast in foil packets. The scanner beeped correctly along the first row. Along the second row it beeped, and the display read *1*.
The thing on the shelf was a jar of honey. The label said *Dunmore House Brand, Wildflower, 500 g*, with a handwritten price in the corner.
The Dunmore did not stock honey. Its only sweetener was white sugar, in paper bags.
She put the jar back. Someone on the late shift had left stock on the wrong shelf. She would note it and go home.
She scanned the shelf again. *1*. She scanned the empty bay beside it. *0*. Then the bay after that, which held three jars of honey, and the label on each now read *Count: 1 of 1*.
· · ·
She checked the other sheets. Dairy: correct. Frozen: correct. Tinned fish: correct. Cleaning: correct, except one bottle of bleach on a shelf marked *0*, which was full, and which she could not make herself touch.
She took a photo of the honey bay with her phone. Then she took another. In the second photo the jars had gone, and the bay held sugar bags exactly as it should, and the scanner read *0*.
She compared them. In the first, a faint ring of sticky light showed on the shelf where the jars had stood. Such rings form when a jar has sat in one place for a long time, and this was fresh, and the second photo had no ring at all.
She put the phone away and noticed her hand was shaking, and that she had been holding the scanner so hard the trigger had clicked three times without her pressing it.
· · ·
The staff room clock read 11:41. The second hand had stopped between two marks. She waited for it to move. It did not move, and she could hear the coffee machine working, and nothing else.
The back store held thirty-two boxes of cereal. She counted them, and the number matched. She felt better for almost a minute.
The freezer was past the bread rack, at the far end of the building. The door was shut, which was normal. The light inside was on, which was not.
The handle was cold through her glove. Inside, the cold made her breath show.
Frozen peas. Fish fingers. Ice cream in tubs. Pastry boxes stacked to the top shelf. And along the bottom shelf, in neat rows, a dozen jars of honey.
She lifted the scanner and aimed it at the nearest jar. The beep was very loud in that cold.
*1.*
She moved the beam to the next jar. *1.* The next. *1.* Each time she counted, there seemed to be one more jar in the row than there had been a moment earlier, as though the shelf were filling from the far end toward her, lining up exactly where her eyes had just been.
She stopped counting. The counting was what made the row grow. She felt that clearly, the way you feel a stair that is not where your foot expected it.
She set the scanner down on the floor.
On the stock sheet she crossed out the line for honey and wrote *Not stocked*. Under that, *Store: closed*. Under that, the time, 11:58. She signed it and folded it in half and put it in her pocket, and she turned to go back down the aisle toward the doors.
The doors were not where she had left them. The aisle ran straight to the far end, past the bread rack and the freezer and the staff room, and every aisle she passed had the same tins and the same bags and the same clock on the wall, 11:58, the second hand fixed.
She walked back to the freezer. She did not open it. She walked to the staff room, to the back store, to aisle nine, and each time the peaches were counted and right and the lights were on and the sheet in her pocket was heavier than paper should be.
She found the scanner again in aisle eleven. Its display read *1*. Beside it was a jar of honey, lid on, label facing out.
She did not pick it up. She walked on past it, and the aisle went on, and somewhere behind her the freezer light clicked off.
· · ·
At six the night manager found the lights on in every aisle and the doors locked. Haruka was sitting on the floor in aisle eleven with her back against a rack of sugar bags. She had a jar of honey open in her lap and was eating from it with a spoon.
"It's sweet," she said. "It's really sweet. Did you know it's cold in the freezer?"
He looked at the sheet in her other hand. Every line had a number. Every number matched. At the bottom, under her signature, a second hand had added a line in small, neat letters.
*Honey: Count 1 of 1. Please do not reshelve.*
She looked up at him politely, the way you look at a colleague who has come to take over your shift.
"I'll finish the freezer," she said. "You don't have to count it. It's all there now."