Burnside, 3:47 AM

The song begins before the music does. A voice reads a receipt aloud — flat, unhurried, no reverb: Quick Stop #117, 804 Burnside Avenue, Akron, Ohio. Thursday, September 19th, 3:47 AM. Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia, one pint. Advil PM. A three-pack of disposable razors. Fourteen twenty-three. Cash. No receipt printed — she pressed no. That's the whole document. That's the whole night.

What a receipt can't tell you: she drove twelve minutes to get here, at three-thirty in the morning, with no radio on. He moved out last Tuesday. She's been counting the days since then, not because she wants to, but because the numbers are the only thing that stay still. The Advil PM is not a sleep aid anymore; it's how she makes the ceiling stop talking. And the razor — she stood in front of that shelf for four minutes. She bought the three-pack because it was cheaper. She hasn't decided anything. She's just very tired of deciding things.

She eats the ice cream in the car, in the parking lot, with the door closed and the windows fogging over. The lights above the pumps hum at a frequency that feels like something she's heard before. Someone inside is restocking the refrigerators. It's the kind of hour where everyone present has their own arithmetic, their own reason for being somewhere other than home.

She drives back. The apartment is still empty. She is still here.

"Burnside, 3:47 AM" is episode fourteen of The Receipt Songs — a series of noir-Americana ballads where a found receipt becomes the only evidence of what someone's night actually was. This one belongs to a woman in Akron. The receipt is fabricated. The feeling isn't.