[ WP ] The First Sign has come . Blood has been spilled , on hallowed ground . Why a convenience store was consecrated , neither angels nor demons could figure out .

It was almost the end of my shift. 
 
 The end of my shift is more like the end of the store, for the day. This is because I'm the one that closes the store. 
 
 I sweep the floors, then mop the floors. The sweeping is fairly half-assed and accomplishes little. The mopping is likewise half-assed, but the addition of water and industrial cleaning product makes the entire process somewhat more productive, I guess. The stuff we used was called Fabuloso, which always struck me as strangely ethnic, borderline racist, maybe. Usually purple but sometimes a lighter teal-blue color, which I preferred due to its relative novelty. It made the store smell nice even if the floors did n't exactly end up any cleaner. 
 
 The thing about mops is they mostly just spread the shit around. 
 
 After mopping I had to count the lottery cards. The lottery is the most important part of any convenience store. Your boss will tell you at the start of your first shift, in a thick Middle-Eastern or Indian accent, even before he mentions that under no circumstances should you ever let anyone use the bathroom ever, that should you ever be unfortunate enough to be robbed, and during the course of this hypothetical but very real-to-you-in-the-moment robbery should any lottery tickets be robbed from you, the first thing you should do post-robbery is call the lottery company and tell them which tickets were stolen so they can be cancelled before they can be cashed. 
 
 Do this before you call the police, even. 
 
 The reasoning behind this being if the stolen tickets are cashed before you can cancel them, your boss has to pay for them. Depending on how lucky the criminal is, this can really add up. 
 
 Convenience stores are n't million-dollar businesses. You make enough to pay the bills. That's what my boss told me, anyway. After he told me about the tickets. 
 
 The lottery count is one of those things that looks a lot more involved than it actually is. You have a clipboard, and you look at all the ticket rolls, writing down the three-digit number of the last ticket of each roll. Sometimes you flip back and forth between a couple different pages because the ticket layout is different than the physical layout, in the plastic boxes. Sometimes you spend a minute trying to figure out whether'Super Millions' corresponds to'Super Melons' on the clipboard, or even'Super Mans'. 
 
 If someone buys another ticket after you've written the number down, you have to erase it and write the number again. 
 
 To the casual observer, this almost looks difficult. 
 
 It was then, clipboard and pencil still in my hands, that they walked in.
