Retail Fairytale

Today’s post is a writing challenge. This is how it works: participating bloggers picked 4 – 6 words or short phrases for someone else to craft into a post. All words must be used at least once and all the posts will be unique as each writer has received their own set of words. That’s the challenge, here’s a fun twist; no one who’s participating knows who got their words and in what direction the writer will take them. Until now.

My words are: clumsy, sticky, soft, water, retreat, stump. And they were submitted by the lovely Karen at www.bakinginatornado.com

It's been a hell of a week at my part time job, and I suppose this story is an accurate description of my current feelings. haha. I'm kidding. Sort of. 

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Once upon a time in a land quite like the one we live in now, there lived a not-so-young-anymore maiden who had a penchant for sass and wearing all black. She had soft, pink lips that punctuated her near-perfect RBF (resting bitch face for those who don’t know), brownish hair that longed to be vibrant, and super pale skin that she tried 98% of the time to keep out of all sunlight. She was a loner, ya’ll, a rebel, and she was pretty determined to live life on her own terms.

More than anything she wanted to save up money for solar panels and new tattoos and baby goats, so even though she didn’t really NEED to get a part time job since she and her hetero-life-mate could live comfortably on one salary and odds and ends, she did it anyway hoping that the extra income would make her life a little more comfortable. I mean, someone had to play for Pokemon Go purchases, right?

She found herself working at a small market near her thatched roof shanty of a house. The market itself was situated between two very small villages of mostly peasants like herself who made their livings by working hard and living cheaply. Those were the people she saw that she often got along with best because she understood and had felt the quiet modesty of knowing you worked hard to pay your bills. Sometimes lords and ladies or even royalty came in to pick up a much needed item or two, but for the most part, they were nightmarish brutes who expected a level of perfection in service that was absolutely unobtainable especially with everything she had to get done and with the management of the market completely out of her hands anyway. She worked for wages, poor ones, and that was all. Most decisions on the day to day stuff were at the hands of the owners and managers.

One day after a particularly long shift filled to bursting with the clumsy attempts at flirtations from would-be suitors, she was confronted by a sticky troll of a man who compared her to a popular weightloss guru with a similar name and insisted that she come to dinner at his house one night so he could give her some tips and then play just the tip. At the time, she took the high road in order to keep her job and laughed it off, but she just couldn’t get over it. Every day at work was something new with some other asshole, but that one thing kept eating away at her.

No woman, she had thought, deserves to have her body graded by men everyday while she was simply trying to earn a paycheck.

Women’s bodies are not on this planet for men’s piggish entertainment!
No one should have to be told their body doesn’t meet some random man’s standards as if by existing she has invited his gaze, opinions, and advances.

So she decided to take matters in her own hands. At first, figuring out her next course of action stumped her a bit. She wasn’t sure if she should simply walk out of the market with two birds held high or perhaps she could set the building on fire as one of her favorite theatrical characters, Milton Waddums, had done in one of her all time favorite comedies. Or maybe she should play an extremely mean-spirited but ultimately harmless prank on the man in question.

It was too hard of a choice, so she settled on all three—she would prank the troll, flip the whole place off, set it ablaze, then retreat her very round ass right back home to enjoy her new-found freedom with a box of teal hair dye and a bottle of whiskey.

And she had thought of the most perfectly devious plan to do so without really getting caught.

First, she waited on the troll to return to the market. Every time he came in, he bought soap to wash his ratty, tattered garments with, so as soon as she saw him walking towards the market from his village (not the one she lived in luckily), she went back to the area with the soap, found the clearest stuff on the shelf, and dripped it here and there over the entire aisle. She didn’t want too big of a puddle. Nothing obvious or noticeable, of course, but she definitely wanted it to be a bit slippery. With that part finished, she waited until he was almost to the mess she had made, rounded the corner feigning surprise at seeing him there, and called out to him, “hey, I’ve been hoping you would come by!”

“Why is that?” he asked.

“I’ve been thinking that I rejected your dinner invitation and fitness tips a little too hastily and wanted to know if your offer still stands?”

“I knew you would see things my way,” he smirked. As soon as that sickening half grin plastered across his face, he started sliding across the floor. It was in no way elegant or graceful. His arms flapped at his sides like he was a bird desperately attempting to take off. His feet moved like he was just learning to walk, and he reconstructed everything she ever thought she knew about swear words in just a couple seconds.

When he fell, he fell hard. In fact, he dropped to the ground with such a crash that she almost didn’t laugh out of genuine concern for his well-being. For just a split second, she thought maaaayyybe she took things too far. But then she saw the look on his face—the way that one slip had wiped the entitlement and ego right off him—and she laughed so hard, so loud, and so long that she felt faint by the time her giggles subsided.

She was alone with him in the back of the store so no one actually heard their conversation or knew what happened, but she could see him getting angrier by the second, and she planned this part betting on him being a shouter.

She was right. Of course.

As soon as her laugher died down and his embarrassment really started to settle into every pore on his body, his gaze darkened, his brows furrowed, and he started huffing. Before he could even get himself off the ground, he was screaming at her.

“You think this is funny, you fat bitch! I will make you pay for this. I know you had something to do with it, you oversensitive psycho. I will burn this whole shit heap to the ground!”

That was all it took. She had a patsy. She couldn’t have planned a reply that good if her life had depended on it.

Once he stormed away, she went to find the managers and relayed what had happened (omitting the part about deliberately making the mess) and what the man had said afterwards. They seemed unconcerned and didn’t even plan on calling the sheriff hoping that ignoring the threat would prevent them from having to get anyone else involved in the matter. Their main worry was not being liable for the fall as she knew it would be as it is in every retail hell hole that exists in all the world. Things are designed to create this line of thinking in management much to the scorn of the employees who bare the weight of it. Now, had he been stealing, that would have been a completely different story.

She didn’t actually think his threat put her or anyone else in imminent danger, but for her 3 part plan to work, she needed the managers to think she was A) scared for her life and B) pretty fucking pissed that they refused to stand behind her on this. Once they finished telling her that they really didn’t want to have to get the authorities involved in case it made the man want to take them to court over the fall and have them pay for any potential injuries and damages, she summoned her best Liv Tyler from Empire Records impression and flipped right the fuck out. “FINE?!?! I’LL SHOW YOU FINE!” then she gave her two weeks notice and said, quite clearly, “Fuck this place.” She knew it was risky to lose it knowing full well the managers could make her leave the place right then, but that also meant they would have to do her job and theirs, and she made a calculated yet risky bet that they would at least want her to finish out her shift before finding a replacement. That gamble paid off well, and she was pretty much left alone to do what she needed to do for the rest of her shift.

That night when she was doing her nightly clean up routine before closing, she made sure that the near-rusted-out water pipes out back were completely broken effectively cutting off all water to the store. She also turned on the furnace in back to full blast and sat a box full of flammable torch fluid nearby. Once that was done, she locked the doors, set the alarm like always, and skipped all the way back home.

And she lived in peace away from retail work happily ever after.

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Links to the other “Use Your Words” posts:



Baking In A Tornado http://www.bakinginatornado.com/2016/08/use-your-words-from-shark-to-manatee.html

Southern Belle Charm http://www.southernbellecharm.com

Spatulas on Parade http://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com/2016/08/life-is-but-vapor-uyw.html

The Bergham Chronicles http://berghamchronicles.blogspot.com/2016/08/stable-layne-pt-2-useyourwords-aug-2016.html

The Diary of an Alzheimer’s Caregiver http://www.thediaryofanalzheimerscaregiver.com/blog.html

On the Border http://dlt-lifeontheranch.blogspot.com/2016/08/skate-rotate-and-celebrate.html

Confessions of a part time working mom http://thethreegerbers.blogspot.com/2016/08/use-your-words-too-many-cooks-spoil.html

Sparkly Poetic Weirdo http://sparklyjenn.blogspot.com/

Never Ever Give Up Hope http://batteredhope.blogspot.com

Dinosaur Superhero Mommy http://dinoheromommy.com/

The Negotiation

“Before I do this, I want you to know I never meant it to be this way.”

He holds the gun on her, but his grip is loose and hand shaky. It isn’t the ironclad grip of a black heart. Maybe he means what he said. Maybe that gives her some leverage. It’s worth a shot anyway. At this point, she really has nothing to lose.

She pauses for a minute really looking at him this time. She had been afraid to before, afraid that if she really saw him, he’d never let her go, but she realizes that was the wrong approach. Right now, if she is going to live through this and fuck did she never realize just how much she wanted to get old until tonight…if she is going to make it, she has to get personal.

He has long, brownish hair that needed a good wash. His face is lean, gaunt really, like he hasn’t been eating too well for quite some time, but the baggy, ragged clothes he has on kind of hid the rest of him from view. She can’t tell just how thin he is. His hair hangs around his ears almost touching his shoulders. There is some patchy fuzz on his face that can’t really be called a beard, dark circles under his sunken eyes. His cheeks are pock-marked and a band of sores wrap his brow with more on his chin. He isn’t well. Drugs, maybe. Meth? Crack? She doesn’t see track marks on his arms. No scars. No tattoos that she could locate. His clothes are stained, black in places, worn, ripped. If she had to guess, he has no job, no ability to get one, no food, no money, and a hell of a need to get his fix, whatever that fix might be.

“Don’t look at me. I can’t do this if you’re looking at me like that. You’re creeping me out. Turn your fucking head.”

She doesn’t do what she’s asked and makes eye contact instead. He’s the one to turn away from her, and she thinks that’s good. She doesn’t think he’s done this before. He certainly doesn’t act like a killer not that she’s ever kept company with one to know. She thinks maybe he would be more deliberate, less hesitant, less shaky if he really wanted to do it, if he started this with the intention of doing it. If it wasn’t a big deal, he wouldn’t care if she looked at him. He wouldn’t even see her as a human being. In theory, at least. She could be wrong. She hopes not, but she could be.

Her words come out in stutters when she finally says to him, “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

“I don’t know anything, bitch. And neither do you. You’re all banged up. You’re tied up. Just how the fuck am I going to get out of this if you’re alive?”

“I would tell you that I’ll never call the cops, but that’s what they always say in the movies and it never works.”

“Do you think I’m stupid?”

Even in this moment, she is about to burst with sarcasm. Her mother always told her that her mouth would cash a check her ass couldn’t handle one of these days, and this was almost it. The words were almost pouring out of her mouth faster than she could blink. She closed them off, almost painfully, and thought for a second trying to gain her composure.

“Okay, look…I know you think that killing me is the only way to solve all your problems, and believe me, if I could have avoided coming home, there’s no way I would be here right now. You could have it all. All of it. Take it. But, what if you kill me and it doesn’t solve things? What if you kill me and you get caught like a lot of people get caught then you go to jail for like, I don’t know, forever. for life. No parole. Or executed. Doesn’t this state have the death penalty? I don’t think you want to die any more than I do. Think about it. We can come up with a solution for this where both of us don’t end up dying because my date was a total shitbag…”

He starts pacing then. Full on pacing back and forth, shaking his head. She watches him more scared than ever. He was slapping himself in the forehead with one hand mumbling thinkthinkthink under his breath. No sane person would be doing this, right? And how was she ever going to rationalize with a mentally deranged man.

“There’s no way anybody would ever figure out it was me. No fucking way.”

“There’s CCTV several different places along this street. You aren’t wearing gloves; do you have a record? You have long hair. I’m sure some have fallen out. Don’t you watch those CSI shows? I mean, that’s not the way things really work all the time, but there’s ways. It’s possible. More than possible really. You might get lucky and get away with it, but think about it. Really think about it. You’re not cut out for prison, man. I can look at you and tell.”

“Bitch, you don’t know a fucking think about me.” He pauses, stops pacing for a minute. “What the fuck is CCTV?”

“Closed cameras or whatever. The couple of stores along the street on the way here have cameras that show every minute outside. There’s a bank, too. And the apartment building across the street has some too that show, I think, the entrance to this place. It might not, but it’s possible. And they’ll end up getting all the tapes and trying to figure out who was in this neighborhood that didn’t belong here during the time they figure I died.”

“What if I don’t leave your body here, cut it up and throw it in the woods somewhere or put you down in the river?”

“Well…they’ll probably still figure out who I am and then where I lived. Depending on when my body is found, the CCTV might have been recorded over, so you might be safe. Might not. It’s still a risk.”

He paces again. She marvels at how she is keeping calm while saying things like my body, while he talks about maybe cutting her up into little pieces like a bad horror flick.

“I can’t just leave you to it. I walk outta here and 10 seconds later you call the cops before I even got a chance to get off this block.”

“I won’t if that means I’ll live. But, I don’t know how I can convince you of that which is ultimately our dilemma and that’s what we need to come to an agreement about.”

“Miss, just what the hell do you think you can come to an agreement about with the man who beat and robbed you?”

“If I knew that already, I would have said so. But, I’m thinking. If you mean to kill me anyway, why not give me 10 more minutes to work on it. Like a dying wish. Do you grant those?”

He stares at her for what feels like forever almost staring through her. “I ain’t done this before.” It’s almost a whisper. “But you got 10 minutes against my better judgment.” He barks a laugh then. “Who am I kidding? I don’t have good judgment any other time. Might as well keep the tradition alive.”

She watches him sit down across from her. He looks exhausted. Her brain circles maddeningly searching for a solution, for THE answer, for anything that might save her life. But there was nothing. She circles and circles, a whirlpool of thoughts threatening to pull her down into the exact state of panic that would end with him shooting her. She is reaching frantically for a branch that might keep her from drowning and seeing nothing much at all except an occasional rock that would surely quicken her exit from the world. And then out of nowhere she finds something. It’s a twig really. Nothing stable for sure, but the words are out of her mouth before she really even thinks it through all the way.

“I’ll give you a job.”

His brow furrows. He looks at her like she must have looked at him when he was slapping himself in the forehead.

“What in the fuck are you talking about?”

“I own a shop in town. Like a thrift store. I don’t need someone full time, and obviously right now you can’t handle the money side of the business, but I need someone to help me put out stock and go with me to pick things up because I want to start getting some bigger furniture pieces. I need help keeping the place clean and doing little odds and ends.”

“What’s it pay?”

“Do you really have room to negotiate?” A bit of anger flared in the pit of her stomach before she could control it.

“Do you?”

“Point taken. It would be…I don’t know, man…like $8 an hour…..” He starts to interrupt her but she barrels through, “but that could be negotiated later on. And here’s the thing, I’d send you to rehab too. I have some money saved up. Maybe it’s not what you want to do right now. But, you look like you need help. I don’t think you meant for all this to happen. I don’t think you’d be able to live with yourself if you kill me tonight at least I hope not to be honest. And this is a chance at a full, clean fresh start. Sometimes people need that, you know? And maybe if you take a chance on this and I take a chance on you, we’ll figure it out as we go.”

He sits there for a long time. Quiet. Head down. The gun is at his side on the floor now and that’s good she thinks but the quiet scares her more than anything. Her head has never hurt her as badly as it does right now. He clears his throat. She looks up at him then. His eyes are swimmy, she notices. He opens his mouth then stops getting choked up a bit.

“Why?” he finally manages to ask.

“Why not?” she says.

This has been another Sunday Confession with More Than Cheese and Beer. The prompt was "before." Sometimes when I sit down to write, I don't know where the story is going or what's going to happen. The words just tumble onto the screen in an outpouring with my hands flying fast on the keyboard...so fast my brain can barely follow the story. The ending is just as much a surprise to me sometimes as I imagine it is for people reading it or at least hope it is. Anyway, hope you enjoyed it. It might not be terribly realistic, but as someone who has a lot of contact with offenders and who wants a career working with offenders, it's interesting to consider just how much getting a fresh start would mean to someone who has nothing. Thanks for reading. Be sure to check out MTCAB for the other blogger link ups and the facebook page for some other confessions.