33. Playing A Supporting Role In Someone Else’s Glitch
This technically happened last night, but I was just starting a graveyard shift and am only now getting it all down. I work at a gas station chain. We’re just outside of a large chunk of suburbs—definitely not “middle of nowhere.” We aren’t exactly near any other businesses, but we are rarely completely empty for hours at a time.
It was just past midnight, and with everything going on right now, not a lot of things other than gas stations and bars are open at night anymore, so it was a slower evening. I was the only one in the store and a car pulled up to one of the two double-sided pumps out front. The car was a pretty standard white four-door.
I’m not great with car brands, but it was a little nicer, like upper-middle class and probably only a few years old. A woman gets out and starts walking towards our door like she’s in a daze. Legit, this woman looked like she saw a ghost. She wanders up, sort of freezes at the door for a second with a thousand-yard stare, before opening it and coming in.
She didn’t go looking for anything, didn’t start shopping, just sort of stood inside for what felt like ages. Again, bars are still open so I think maybe she’s had a rough night or something, so I give the usual “Welcome, let me know if you need any help finding anything.” She finally notices me and immediately asks me a question that makes my blood run cold.
She looks at me and says: “You can see me right?” I reply, “Yeah.” Like what else do you say? She breaks down crying in the middle of my store, so I’m already headed around the counter to see what’s up. I have my cellphone out in case I need to call law enforcement or something for her. I get her to sit down on a nearby pallet of soda and I grab her a bottle of water.
After she catches her breath a little, she tells me “I thought I had died.” Again, I’m thinking maybe she is on something, but she’s a middle-aged woman who looks like a standard local suburban housewife. So, she asks if she can call her husband to pick her up and wait with me. She has her own phone and does so, not really telling him anything either, just where she is at and if he can come get her.
He says he’ll call an Uber and be there as soon as possible. We’re waiting, so far nobody else has showed up, so I’m keeping most of my attention on her, and eventually, she starts to tell her utterly unforgettable story. She says, “I was driving home from dinner with my coworkers and as I’m driving through this nearby intersection, a truck ran a red light and hit me.”
Now, her car is still at the pump without a scratch on it. She goes on to say she remembers her car being pushed into a pole, going airborne, and then nothing. I tried to calm her down, letting her know that her car is out front and it looks fine, but she insisted that she completely blacked out, woke up in an ambulance for a split second, passed out again, and then woke up again in the driver seat of her car—at the intersection waiting for the light to change, perfectly fine.
This whole thing freaked her out so badly that she drove to the nearest place that was open just so she could get out of the car. Her husband eventually showed up to get her. He asked if I had any idea what happened, and even though she had sort of explained it to me, I just shrugged because no, I had no idea what was happening anymore.
She reluctantly got into the passenger seat of the car and he drove them back home. That was hours ago, after which I worked an entire shift at the station trying to wrap my head around what in heaven’s name I had just witnessed.