When 2008 hit and I got laid off from Circuit City, a friend of mine managed to get me work at the local supermarket deli. It was a shit job, but I was beyond grateful at the time.

Interesting people work at the deli, or at least they did then. Ty was 6’4” and maybe 150lbs, the loud-mouthed stoner to my reserved stoner—that is to say, my best friend and the reason I had a job. Chester was something of a loner, with this long, greasy mullet, but was friendly enough. Tina was a punk rocker just here until her band made it on tour, with bright pink hair and anarchist tattoos. And then there was Roz, a quiet, middle-aged guy with thick glasses and a crew cut, whose nickname was short for Roswell, on account of the fact that he claimed he was being abducted by aliens.

The worst part of the job was the customers, who were entitled beyond belief and hardly seemed to view us as human (the feeling was mutual). Complaining about them was a favored pastime of Tina, Ty, and myself. Chester was more polite, to his credit, and Roz had his head in the stars. He worked Sunday to Thursday, and, every Thursday evening, he’d say goodbye to us in case the aliens decided to take him away for good that weekend, in which case he wouldn’t be able to come into work Sunday because he’d be on a ship hundreds of light-years away, learning the wisdom of the galaxy. We’d wish him bon voyage and see him again Sunday morning.

Our store manager Mike was, generally speaking, an asshole. Already a petty tyrant, the recession really juiced him up. There was a constant line of people in front of his office, begging for jobs; that kind of thing goes to a guy’s head. Ty had slipped me in because Mike somehow thought he was a good worker, but Mike’s asshole nature was well-remarked upon in the deli, and the rituals of light hazing I endured as the new guy usually centered around throwing me into conflict with him. The most frequent of these was stealing lemons from the produce section. Residue would build up in the deli’s ancient cheese slicer, and if you didn’t clean it out it would jam up. The cleaning gel was bright blue and noxious and took fifteen minutes to break down the gunk, and meanwhile the line would back up with customers losing their shit. The bootleg solution, then, was to run a couple lemons through the slicer; the acid cut right through the cheese residue, and we were back online within a minute or two.

Mike hated the lemon trick, claiming it damaged the machine. I don’t know if that was true, but, as far as we were concerned, the sooner that piece of shit broke down for good, the better. In the meantime, the lemons were the only things keeping us sane. Mike was always on the prowl, and he’d make sure to do his rounds coming through produce on the way to the deli, trying to catch us. He used to watch on the security cameras too, but Roz had figured out a way to sabotage the one near the deli and after that no one had been able to fix it. We asked him how he’d done it, and he just gave us this look like we didn’t want to know.

So, this one day, Chester’s late for work and we’re drowning. A customer is arguing with Tina about how many meatballs she put on his sub, and she’s holding her ground, so Ty sidesteps the whole situation to take the woman next in line, who proceeds to order two pounds of Swiss, sliced thin. Roz is battling it out with the cheese slicer, muttering something about barbaric technologies, and I’m dispatched for aid from heaven—which is to say, the lemons. I’m practically sprinting back with an armful when I collide with Chester, who is coming in two hours late, red-faced and crying.

Like I said, Chester was a bit of a loner, but he did have one friend outside work—this little green parrot. I say outside work, but he brought Oscar in sometimes when he picked up a shift in the back and didn’t have to wear a hairnet. The bird would sit on Chester’s shoulder and hide in his hair, though there was little risk of discovery as Mike rarely checked the stockroom unless there was a reason. Oscar liked doing that with Tina too, when we’d take breaks to go say hello, but apparently wasn’t a fan of people with shorter hair, since the one time Chester put him on me, he bit my ear.

Pretty much everyone liked to play with Oscar, except for Roz, who would just hang back and watch. I didn’t give it much thought, until one time we were having a slow morning and I asked Roz what the aliens looked like, and he glanced at me like I was an idiot and said “birds.” “They’re birds?” I’d pressed, and he said that obviously they were birds, and then he explained that life had evolved on their planet very similarly to on our own, except that they didn’t have a total fluke of an asteroid come by and wipe out the dinosaurs and give their little mammals a chance to evolve and get bigger, so instead the most advanced dinosaurs—birds are dinosaurs, he said—ended up as this great, spacefaring civilization. I nodded along and looked up that “birds are dinosaurs” thing later; it was true. After that, I realized he’d been looking at the parrot with a kind of cautious respect, and Ty and I cracked a few jokes about Oscar transmitting back to the mothership.

Back to the day in question, Chester was late because, that morning, he’d found Oscar on the bottom of his cage, dead of unknown causes.

After we clear the line, Chester gets it together to invite us over for a service that night, and while that doesn’t exactly sound like my idea of a good time, Tina jumps in and commits us all to going. So, after work, Tina and I pile into Ty’s car, a battered Chevy Monte Carlo he calls the Count (“like the book”), and head to Chester’s place, which turns out to be in a mobile home park.

Roz is already there, but while the rest of us are still in our work clothes, he’s managed to change into a white button-down and slacks, which makes me pick self-consciously at the mustard stain on my khakis. The trailer is a little messy, but there’s a huge polished cage of green metal given pride of place in the living room, and it’s in this that Oscar’s body has been laid on a cushion in a shoebox. He looks like he’s sleeping, though I know from Chester that he used to sleep standing up on one leg.

Chester kicks it off, delivering his best friend’s eulogy through occasional sobs. Oscar had been eerily smart for a bird, he says. He understood everything. He could open his cage from the inside, he always knew where Chester had hidden the bag of peanuts, and he could tell when Chester was feeling down because he’d jump over to comfort him. They’d been together since Chester was twelve and Oscar was ten weeks old and the people at the pet store had said he could live for up to thirty-five years, but he was only seventeen and hadn’t been sick at all and it just didn’t make sense.

The rest of us go in quick succession. Ty says something about how tough it was when his dog passed a couple years back, so he feels for Chester. Tina talks about how she loved when Oscar would sit on her shoulder. I follow that up by saying I don’t hold a grudge for the ear-biting, which gets a smile out of Chester.

Pretty soon, there’s only one person left, and in the brief pause after I finish, it all comes back to me—the dinosaurs and the asteroid and how serious Roz would look leaving work every Thursday—except now it doesn’t feel like as big of a joke, and I get the premonition that something is about to go down.

So, Roz steps up to the plate, and he’s got this totally different look from any of the rest of us. I think we all feel sympathetic for Chester because, even if the guy’s a bit eccentric, it sucks to lose a pet, and it’s not like he’s got much else going for him. But Roz, he’s the only one approaching this on the same terms as Chester, by which I mean, he’s not sad for Chester, or maybe he is but only tangentially; he’s there to mourn Oscar as his own being.

Roz stands there like an ambassador from another world and begins to speak: “I did not know Oscar well. Three hundred million years of evolution separates his line from our own—deep time. But he was, nonetheless, a friend to Chester, and I know that Chester was a friend to him. Our species has not been a good friend to the others with which we share this world. That fact has been noted, elsewhere. There are those who would condemn us for it. I have been pleading our case. The future does not have to be as the past. And you, Chester, in your friendship with Oscar, are an exemplar of that. I do not wish to burden you, but I have a request. May I have something of him, to lend to my purpose?”

It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever heard, but Chester gets up and goes to a little table next to the cage. He opens the drawer, and it looks like he’s collected some feathers that have fallen out over the years. Oscar was mostly green, with some grey on his head and blue in his wings, but his tail feathers were long and red. Chester takes out the biggest one and hands it gingerly to Roz.

“I will bear this with me, like a missive for peace,” Roz tells him, and after that none of us have anything left to say.

Ty and I take turns using a little garden shovel to dig a hole in the ground behind Chester’s trailer, and we bury Oscar in the shoebox. Chester says a few last words and, when it’s done, Tina makes sure he’s okay to be left alone, and he says yeah, he’s exhausted and just wants to go to bed.

The Count doesn’t go in reverse, so Tina and I have to push from the hood while Ty throws it in neutral to get out of the parking spot. We sit in the car once it’s going, not saying much, until after we drop Tina off and it’s just me and Ty.

“Well, that was fucking weird,” he says.

And the statement just sits there for a minute, but it isn’t sitting right. Because I would have agreed a few hours before—we always laughed about Roz—but something had happened in that trailer.

“Nah, man. It was fucking powerful is what it was.”

“Powerfully crazy.”

“Fuck off, man.” I don’t know why, but now I’m getting worked up. “Can you take one thing seriously in your goddamn life for a change?”

“What?” he asks. “You don’t believe all that shit about birds and aliens, do you? I mean, I’m sad for Chester, sure. I’m just saying, Roz kind of went off the rails there.”

“I don’t know what I believe. The way he said—well, I don’t know. Maybe it is true.”

Ty laughs. “Come on, man. Even if there were aliens, they wouldn’t be talking to someone like Roz. They’d be going to the president or the UN or a scientist or something, not one of us nobodies at the fucking deli.”

“Why not? Our lives matter as much as anyone else’s. Yours, mine, Chester’s, Tina’s. Roz’s. Our boss is a piece of shit and the president’s a piece of shit and the CEO of Circuit City’s a piece of shit, so maybe it’s just pieces of shit all the way up and people like us down here in the fucking dirt are the ones who are the most human. And if there are aliens, maybe they know that. Maybe they’ve seen how the pieces of shit have handled things, and they’re looking for someone, anyone, who’s different. And hell, sure, maybe that’s Roz. Why not?”

“Yeah,” Ty says after a long minute. “Sure. Why not.”

We’re silent until he drops me off at my apartment. The next day, I get fired.

I’m making a lemon run that morning, but I’m distracted, still thinking about last night, so I don’t spot Mike until it’s too late. He doesn’t fire me for that, but he’s yelling, just dressing me down while I stand there in produce holding a lemon, and customers are looking concerned, but he doesn’t give a shit because he gets off on that sort of thing. When he’s done, he turns toward the deli, like I should follow so he can go yell at everyone else too, but I feel this irrational anger just bubbling up, so I throw the lemon as hard as I can and nail him in the back of the head from ten feet. That gets me fired.

He tries to press charges too, but I deny it and the lemon didn’t leave a bruise and, when the cops go to pull the footage, they find the camera still isn’t working, so they just tell me never to go back to the store if I don’t want there to be a problem.

I got drinks with Tina and Ty a month later and heard all the gossip. They replaced me with someone new, but everyone was too afraid to go for the lemons because Mike threatened to fire people on the spot if they did, so the deli backed up several times a day when they had to clean the cheese slicer. Chester was doing okay, starting to talk about getting an iguana. And Roz clocked out on a Thursday and never came back.

Tina said she’d gone to his house a couple times and his car was out front, but no one answered. Ty just stared at his beer while she was talking, then he changed the subject to an upcoming show her band was playing; it was apparently their biggest gig yet.

It’s been years now and since then I’ve had a lot of shit jobs and a couple alright ones. And I’ve long since lost touch with everyone who worked at the deli, except for Ty. But sometimes, I’ll get home late, roll a joint, look up at the stars, and think about Roz. Probably he finally cracked, a mental break. Or just quit and didn’t tell anyone. But I sit there in my driveway with it all hanging over me and imagine Roz on a spaceship, Roz bearing a red feather to an alien world, Roz coming back in a hundred years, preaching the wisdom of the galaxy. And I like the thought that one of us could do something like that.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Jean McConnell

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors