The Loop at Petro‑South

He sat in the parking lot and looked at his phone. The message to his supervisor had delivered. One blue tick now. Read.
No reply.
He opened his maps app and searched for the depot. Petro-South Bakersfield. The pin landed where it should, exactly where he had been, on a straight road with no loops.
He stared at the screen for a while.
Then he put the car in gear and drove home.
—
The watcher watched the taillights disappear north and not come back.
He sat with the cold coffee and the silence for a while. The pressure-release valve on top of the far tank was still turning in the wind. Slow and steady, like it always did, like it had for years after the depot was sealed and the pressure should have long since equalized to nothing.
He had reported that once, in his last week on the job. The valve shouldn’t still be turning, he had told the site manager. There’s no pressure left to release.
The manager had looked at it. Shrugged. Probably wind, he had said.
The watcher had not argued. He had clocked out and driven home on Highway 9 the way he had every night for eleven years, and the road had let him go, as it usually did, as it seemed to let most people go most of the time.
He started his engine.
He looked once more at the gate, at the fence, at the row of dark tanks with their pocked surfaces and their old sealed hatches.
He could not be certain what the road did, or why it did it, or whether it chose its moments or whether the choosing was the wrong frame entirely, whether the road simply was a certain thing and most people happened to pass through before that thing became visible.
He drove north.
He did not look at the gate.
The interchange came up and he took it, and the lights of Bakersfield spread out ahead of him in the dark, ordinary and indifferent, and he let himself breathe.
Behind him, on the straight flat stretch of Highway 9, the valve on top of the far tank continued to turn.
Slowly.
Steadily.
As if something inside still needed releasing.

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About the Author

Tarek Al-Rami — a safety engineer from the night shift, where an ordinary job can turn into a nightmare.

— Tarek Al-Rami

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August 21, 2026

10min-stories