The Night Shift
A funeral director accepts a late-night ride from a friendly stranger—and realizes mid-conversation that the driver has been dead for years.
# The Night Shift
February 2014. Around 10 PM.
I'd just finished conducting a funeral service for a client. The Riverside Valley Crematorium sat in the middle of nowhere—an hour outside the city in the dead of night, the kind of place drivers took long detours to avoid.
I waited forty minutes at the pickup point. No cars. No lights. Just the wind and the distant hum of the crematorium's cooling units.
I started walking. Three kilometers. If I could cover some ground, maybe I'd find a better spot to catch a ride. I reasoned that walking would at least feel productive, even if it didn't save me much money in the end.
It was nearly midnight when I finally opened the rideshare app. I didn't expect a response—the route was completely rural, nothing but dark fields and occasional farmhouses. But someone accepted.
A white Buick sedan. Coming from the direction of the crematorium. Must've been dropping someone off and didn't want to drive back empty.
When the car pulled up, I got in without hesitation.
The driver was a heavyset man in his forties, clean-shaven, alert. He had the kind of energy that felt almost aggressive after hours of standing in the cold. He even leaned over to unlock the passenger door for me.
Most city drivers around here? Dead silent. They play their own music, stare straight ahead. This guy was different. Warm. Almost too warm.
I didn't think much of it at first. Maybe he was from out of town.
---
The conversation started casually. Then it drifted.
He told me about driving jobs in other cities. Hartford. Albany. Rochester. Then somehow he circled back to our area—the city where I lived.
"The Starlight Theatre," he said. "I saw a film there a few days ago. Great picture quality."
The Starlight. The old theater on Miller Avenue.
I knew that building. It had been demolished in 2002. A parking lot sat there now.
I didn't correct him. Instead I stayed quiet, watching the road ahead.
"Yeah, I like movies too," I finally said.
"Where do you usually go?" he asked.
"The Grand. It's upstairs in the shopping center on Fifth Street. Past the old Sears."
He didn't seem to recognize it. "That place expensive?"
"Not bad. Twenty-five, thirty bucks a ticket."
He let out a low whistle. "That's steep. I usually just go to the Starlite. Ten bucks and you're in."
The Starlite.
That was the old multiplex near the highway. Three thousand seats. A Soviet-era structure from the Cold War era, all brutalist concrete and faded marquee letters. It had been gutted and converted into a dollar store by 1996. Before that, during its final years as a cinema, it barely functioned—a relic nobody wanted to fund, too big to maintain, too public to abandon.
The Starlite was gone. The Starlight was gone. Both of them, gone for over a decade.
This man was talking about them like they were still open.
I started paying closer attention. Not to what he was saying—but to how he was saying it. The way he said _ten bucks_ like it was a reasonable price. The way he talked about the roads like they were still dirt paths carved through farmland, the way the area looked twenty years ago.
In the late nineties, a driver in this region might pull in fifteen hundred dollars a month. Maybe eighteen hundred on a good month.
"So how's business these days?" I asked, keeping my voice neutral.
"Not bad. Two grand a month. Barely making it, you know how it is."
Two thousand dollars a month.
In 2014.
That was taxi-driver money from 1998.
---
I didn't say anything else.
He didn't either.
The silence that followed was different from before. Heavier. Both of us were thinking the same thing—I could feel it in the way he glanced at me through the rearview mirror, just for a second, just long enough.
The car smelled like pine air freshener and old tobacco. The dashboard was dark. Outside, the highway stretched into nothing.
Then I felt a hand on my shoulder.
"Hey. Hey, buddy."
I opened my eyes.
An elderly man in an orange vest stood over me, holding a broom. He was staring at me like I'd lost my mind.
"What are you doing up there?"
I looked down. I was sitting on a pine tree. Not in a car. Not on a road. On a pine tree, five feet off the ground, my legs wrapped around the trunk, my fingers digging into the bark.
The sky was turning pink. Dawn.
A woman stood nearby in a tracksuit, arms crossed. She looked at the old janitor and said, quietly, to her friend: "I saw him around five-thirty this morning. I was doing my run and I heard him talking to himself up there. I thought he was on drugs or something. So I went to find Old Yang."
Old Yang was the janitor. I was in his section.
I climbed down from the tree. My legs were numb. I didn't remember getting there.
I didn't remember any of it.
---
It got worse.
For the next five nights, I woke up on that same stretch of road. Every single night. Same spot. Same pine tree. Even when I locked every door in my apartment. Even when I tied myself to the bed.
I woke up sitting on that tree, talking to someone who wasn't there. In my half-dream state, I was back on that road, waiting for a car that was already waiting for me.
On the sixth night, I felt myself getting up again. But this time, a friend grabbed me. Held me down. And at the exact moment I felt the car door open in my dream, my friend slapped me across the face.
Hard.
I came back all at once. Gasping. My friend was standing over my bed, both of us covered in sweat.
After that, I didn't sleep well for weeks. My friend stayed over for three nights. On the fourth night he left, and by the fifth, I was still glancing at the window every few hours.
---
To this day, I'm careful about late-night rides.
If the driver is calm, tired, maybe a little annoyed to be out working—I relax.
But if he's friendly? If he leans over to unlock the door for me? If he fills the silence with stories about places that don't exist anymore?
I don't get in.
Because somewhere on the road back from the crematorium, I learned the hard way that the dead don't always stay where you leave them.
Sometimes they take you home with them.
And sometimes you don't realize you're already gone until you're sitting in a pine tree at dawn, talking to no one, wondering how long you've been there.
---
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February 2014. Around 10 PM.
I'd just finished conducting a funeral service for a client. The Riverside Valley Crematorium sat in the middle of nowhere—an hour outside the city in the dead of night, the kind of place drivers took long detours to avoid.
I waited forty minutes at the pickup point. No cars. No lights. Just the wind and the distant hum of the crematorium's cooling units.
I started walking. Three kilometers. If I could cover some ground, maybe I'd find a better spot to catch a ride. I reasoned that walking would at least feel productive, even if it didn't save me much money in the end.
It was nearly midnight when I finally opened the rideshare app. I didn't expect a response—the route was completely rural, nothing but dark fields and occasional farmhouses. But someone accepted.
A white Buick sedan. Coming from the direction of the crematorium. Must've been dropping someone off and didn't want to drive back empty.
When the car pulled up, I got in without hesitation.
The driver was a heavyset man in his forties, clean-shaven, alert. He had the kind of energy that felt almost aggressive after hours of standing in the cold. He even leaned over to unlock the passenger door for me.
Most city drivers around here? Dead silent. They play their own music, stare straight ahead. This guy was different. Warm. Almost too warm.
I didn't think much of it at first. Maybe he was from out of town.
---
The conversation started casually. Then it drifted.
He told me about driving jobs in other cities. Hartford. Albany. Rochester. Then somehow he circled back to our area—the city where I lived.
"The Starlight Theatre," he said. "I saw a film there a few days ago. Great picture quality."
The Starlight. The old theater on Miller Avenue.
I knew that building. It had been demolished in 2002. A parking lot sat there now.
I didn't correct him. Instead I stayed quiet, watching the road ahead.
"Yeah, I like movies too," I finally said.
"Where do you usually go?" he asked.
"The Grand. It's upstairs in the shopping center on Fifth Street. Past the old Sears."
He didn't seem to recognize it. "That place expensive?"
"Not bad. Twenty-five, thirty bucks a ticket."
He let out a low whistle. "That's steep. I usually just go to the Starlite. Ten bucks and you're in."
The Starlite.
That was the old multiplex near the highway. Three thousand seats. A Soviet-era structure from the Cold War era, all brutalist concrete and faded marquee letters. It had been gutted and converted into a dollar store by 1996. Before that, during its final years as a cinema, it barely functioned—a relic nobody wanted to fund, too big to maintain, too public to abandon.
The Starlite was gone. The Starlight was gone. Both of them, gone for over a decade.
This man was talking about them like they were still open.
I started paying closer attention. Not to what he was saying—but to how he was saying it. The way he said _ten bucks_ like it was a reasonable price. The way he talked about the roads like they were still dirt paths carved through farmland, the way the area looked twenty years ago.
In the late nineties, a driver in this region might pull in fifteen hundred dollars a month. Maybe eighteen hundred on a good month.
"So how's business these days?" I asked, keeping my voice neutral.
"Not bad. Two grand a month. Barely making it, you know how it is."
Two thousand dollars a month.
In 2014.
That was taxi-driver money from 1998.
---
I didn't say anything else.
He didn't either.
The silence that followed was different from before. Heavier. Both of us were thinking the same thing—I could feel it in the way he glanced at me through the rearview mirror, just for a second, just long enough.
The car smelled like pine air freshener and old tobacco. The dashboard was dark. Outside, the highway stretched into nothing.
Then I felt a hand on my shoulder.
"Hey. Hey, buddy."
I opened my eyes.
An elderly man in an orange vest stood over me, holding a broom. He was staring at me like I'd lost my mind.
"What are you doing up there?"
I looked down. I was sitting on a pine tree. Not in a car. Not on a road. On a pine tree, five feet off the ground, my legs wrapped around the trunk, my fingers digging into the bark.
The sky was turning pink. Dawn.
A woman stood nearby in a tracksuit, arms crossed. She looked at the old janitor and said, quietly, to her friend: "I saw him around five-thirty this morning. I was doing my run and I heard him talking to himself up there. I thought he was on drugs or something. So I went to find Old Yang."
Old Yang was the janitor. I was in his section.
I climbed down from the tree. My legs were numb. I didn't remember getting there.
I didn't remember any of it.
---
It got worse.
For the next five nights, I woke up on that same stretch of road. Every single night. Same spot. Same pine tree. Even when I locked every door in my apartment. Even when I tied myself to the bed.
I woke up sitting on that tree, talking to someone who wasn't there. In my half-dream state, I was back on that road, waiting for a car that was already waiting for me.
On the sixth night, I felt myself getting up again. But this time, a friend grabbed me. Held me down. And at the exact moment I felt the car door open in my dream, my friend slapped me across the face.
Hard.
I came back all at once. Gasping. My friend was standing over my bed, both of us covered in sweat.
After that, I didn't sleep well for weeks. My friend stayed over for three nights. On the fourth night he left, and by the fifth, I was still glancing at the window every few hours.
---
To this day, I'm careful about late-night rides.
If the driver is calm, tired, maybe a little annoyed to be out working—I relax.
But if he's friendly? If he leans over to unlock the door for me? If he fills the silence with stories about places that don't exist anymore?
I don't get in.
Because somewhere on the road back from the crematorium, I learned the hard way that the dead don't always stay where you leave them.
Sometimes they take you home with them.
And sometimes you don't realize you're already gone until you're sitting in a pine tree at dawn, talking to no one, wondering how long you've been there.
---
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