Treading by Leah Sipher-Mann

Sunday

The air in his bedroom is the kind that has a weight to it, the kind that sticks to the sides of your chest and the bottom of your chin.

Sam wakes, stretches his right arm over his head, and watches curled hair on his chest rise and sink with his breath. There is an opened bag of white socks on the nightstand and a few sock balls are spilled out onto the floor. The socks are cut low and when Sam pulls them on, their thick white dulls his legs. His running shoes are next to the bed, each one positioned so that the florescent white socks find their own way into them.

Sam goes to the basement of his building. The only thing there is a large treadmill, its control panel the size of a coffee table and already set at such a steep incline that Sam has to hold the railings as he hoists himself onto the bulky machine. And then he is running. He is watching nothing and listening only to the heavy hum of the belt and the clumping beat of his shoes. Soon, his eyes are teary with sweat and his shoes hit a stuttering beat. Sam imagines the machine is a hairy, writhing animal as he pounds out each new note with his steps.

He runs until each breath in feels the same as each breath out and his legs feel waxy and weak. It is only now that Sam believes he can slay the creature that is pulsing and bending below him. Only now does each step become a grinding blow to the swelling beast and with each blow, Sam is wooing the thing into quiet sleep.

After he stops, he lays down on treadmill belly-up like he does every morning and thanks the heaving machine for a fair fight with his steady, burning breath.

Monday

“I printed up some new nametags,” Hank is saying, “they’re over by the coffeemaker. They look real nice and everybody better be wearing one at all times.”

Sam thinks he is allergic to the uniform blue polyester vest. His skin pokes out in red bumps where the vest touches it. He knows the same thing happens to the other two guys who work the register at the Food Mart in the Mobil because he can see their prickled skin when the vest shifts off their necks.

Or maybe it is the air that they are allergic to, full of thin, slippery gas that seeps into your mouth when it’s not shut.

Sam untangles his nametag from the clump and sees it says “San,” so he takes a ball point and fills out the second arch to make an ‘m.’

Behind the register, Sam faces shelves of chips and other salty snacks. Every day, he shuts his eyes and goes down the line in his mind: Pringles, Doritos, Lay’s, Tostitos, Cheetos, Rold Gold, Combos, Ruffles, Sun Chips, Old Dutch, Goldfish. It only took him two days to memorize the order and then he moved on to the rows of the cigarette packs behind him. Two more days and he was on to the refrigerated drinks lining the wall to the left of the registers.

Tuesday

At around 1 or 2pm, the beep of the door sounds and a large man walks into the Food Mart. Sam knows this man, knows his dented face and the way his shirt opens at the bottom to show the triangle of gray hair on his stomach. The man comes in almost every day and does two or three laps around the store before he brings up his usual bag of Cheddar Lay’s and a Mountain Dew. When Sam starts to ring him up, he will always ask for a scratch off game card. He usually gets the Diamond Dazzler, but sometimes he asks for Gold Rush or Match 3.

The man has never scratched off the cards in front of Sam, but Sam watches him stare down each one before putting it in his back pocket. He’ll hold the card between his thumb and forefinger before sliding it down into his jeans to warm next to his thick body. Sam always thinks how hot the scratch off must get sitting inside his pants. He also thinks how clean his pink fingers are, the fleshy part under his nails unbroken white except for orange specks of cheese left over from his last bag of Lay’s.

“Diamond Dazzler, please,” says the man in his low, rusty voice. The place where his stomach cuts out of his shirt is just barely resting on the counter, gray hairs pushed up on the edge of it. Sam gets him the scratch off and finishes ringing up his pop and chips.

Wednesday

Sam used to think of the names of the kids in his old fifth grade class when he couldn’t fall asleep. Ann, Patricia, Samantha, Kyle, Benjamin, Allen. He pictured their round faces in his mind, each one surrounded by fuzzy white. He thought of them until their faces were so round they were just circles with sloppy carvings, until there was no difference between Mary Ann’s face and Kyle’s, until he couldn’t remember the shape of the boy’s face who always sat behind him.

Now, Sam lies in bed under his beige comforter and all he can do is think of Marlboro, Black & Gold, Camel, Djarm, Legend, Malibu, Natural Blend. He can feel the plastic edges of their cartons. If it gets very late, bags of cartooned chips begin to line themselves up in his head, Tostitos, Cheetos, Rold Gold.

Thursday

He is back on the treadmill in the basement, running down the beast. Below him, it sputters and groans as he presses it back down into the floor with his steps. He is running so fast that his shoes barely brush the belt, the creature below rising up to meet the soles. But Sam slaps it down, shoves that thing hard on its back.

While he is working on the mechanical beast below him, Sam starts thinking about the man and his scratch offs. Maybe the man is in his living room. Probably, there is a TV but the man wants to know what’s on the card so bad that he doesn’t have time to turn it on. He is probably hunched over on his couch in front of that blank TV, rubbing at the card while afternoon light greens the room through empty bottles of Mountain Dew.

Friday

The man is back at the Food Mart. He’s wearing a black shirt and Sam sees cheese dust wiped across the front of it in two places. The man is studying the rows of Lay’s. He fingers through the top three bags before picking up the forth one in line. He turns it over and reads the back of it. Sam thinks the bag looks too small against the man’s pouched stomach and stretched waist. His shirt is hiked up in back and Sam sees still-black hair clinging to the man’s skin.

“You know these things have two grams of protein in each serving?” says the man, not looking up from the Lay’s. “That’s one thing you never think about. You never think about protein.”

The man walks his chips and pop up to the register.

“You get enough protein, son?”

Sam can’t take his eyes off all the cheesy powder on his shirt and his fat fingers. When he picks up the bag of Lay’s, he gets some cheese on his right thumb.

“Can I get a Diamond Dazzler, please?”

After the man pays, Sam watches him walk away. He thinks that the scratch off card must be burning a hole in the man’s tight black jeans pocket.

At the end of his shift, Sam walks to his car and presses both of his hands on the driver side door. It has been sponging up sun all day and is hot to the touch. Sam presses his cheek up to the window and lets the heat melt away at his skin.

It isn’t until Sam gets into his car that he sees the stack of cards stuck under his windshield wiper. The cards are bound together with a green rubber band. He sticks his hand out the window and picks the cards out of the wiper. There must be hundreds of them, all stacked up. When he unwinds the rubber band, he sees that none of them are scratched off. No corner is even a little bent. He puts the rubber band back on and they feel so hot Sam almost drops them onto the passenger seat.

As he is driving home, Sam sees cheese dust all over his fingers and the black steering wheel.

Saturday

Sam picks a fresh pair of white socks from the bag on his nightstand. He tries not to touch them when he puts them on. They already feel warm on his feet when he slides on his running shoes.

Sam steps out of the front door to his building and starts to run. This time, there is no mechanical beast under his feet. No, this time it is whole earth, burnt pavement and soil that stretches and throbs below him. As Sam pushes his shoes into the ground, hot earth swells and balloons upward like thick lava. And even though there is no treadmill to help him lift his feet and bring them forward, Sam feels like he is running as fast as he does on the treadmill and he is as hot as he is on the treadmill. He feels like the sun is draining all of its heat on him, yellow drips of wax weighing down on top of his head.

The scratch offs are pressed under the elastic waistband of his running shorts and he pulls them out without slowing. They are still bound together with the green rubber band and Sam pulls it off and throws it behind him. He spreads out the scratch offs like playing cards in his left hand, still not slowing, and sees the matte gray circles he always imagined the man used a coin to rub off. Sam thinks the man must have thought about all the things these cards could have meant.

Maybe they meant thousands and thousands of bags of Lay’s and a garage full of Mountain Dew. Maybe they meant never having to go around with cheese dust on your shirt.

But the picture is different now. The man is hunched over on his couch in the green light and he can’t scratch off that card. Maybe because he doesn’t want it to be another chance wasted.

And then Sam tastes the cheese, sharp on his tongue, melting deep into the back of his throat. He wants to spit but he keeps running and when each foot hits the ground, Sam hears a low gurgle shoot up from the earth. He is on concrete sidewalk, but he is running so hard his shoes dent the ground with each step and he can feel all the layers of dirt and grass and mud sinking below him. Sam is running for the man, running for his chances not wasted, and he knows the ground is giving a little bit more with each one of his steps,

Sam takes the first scratch off card in his hand and throws it behind him, really chucks it far. It feels so good to hear that card whip through the air that he throws the second card and then the third. Soon, he is throwing them into the air by the fives and tens and when he turns his head around, Sam sees the hundreds of scratch off cards floating in the air. All the cards are just hanging in the air, just suspended there like flies and Sam thinks what the man must have thought, why the man gave him the cards: to tell him that nothing on those cards means anything, nothing on those cards will ever change anything at all because that’s not how it happens.

Sam turns his head back around and sees his building again. He ran a wide circle without even trying, has made a treadmill out of the soft, giving earth. And Sam thinks about how he will go to the Mobil on Monday, how he will say the names of chips or cigarettes with his eyes shut, smelling those slippery gas smells. Maybe the man will come in and maybe he won’t but Sam knows it doesn’t matter because he will just keep running anyway, keep hacking away at that beast below him.