Happy Halloween and Congratulations to our Spooky Story contest winner Madelyn Renken! Thank you for everyone's submissions!
Shop ‘Til You Drop
by Madelyn Renken
Traipsing through a cacophony of raindrops as large and dangerous as stones being shot out of slingshots, a woman curses as she tries to keep her footing on the slick sidewalk beneath her. The curses and the footing struggle continue until something appears in the corner of her vision, and she turns to have a better look at it- “it” turns out to be a busted neon sign with letters that were meant to spell out Bob’s Bobbles and Bits, but that only advertised Bob’s Bits thanks to the two words in the middle lacking light.
“Classy.” The woman snickers.
Usually, she’d turn and go back to whatever she was doing, but now…now, the shining letters in front of her encapsulated her vision with their glow, and the door they hung on couldn’t have looked more inviting bathed in their brilliant light, and all she wished for was to go through that entrance in front of her so that she could be in the light, too….
“Why’d I come in here?” The woman whispers to herself- pointlessly since the sound of the storm outside can no longer be heard in the shop. It must be a shop she thought, looking around at the cluttered piles of objects in varying shades of browns and tans- colors that should be natural, but just…weren’t.
She takes a few steps forward, and it doesn’t take her long to realize she’s shivering.
It’s just because of the rain. She tells herself; that she knows perfectly well that her body is shaking from fear, but she refuses to accept that because if she did she’d be just as bad as her mother.
My mother. She thinks, with no small amount of exasperation That woman is crazy, and now she’s making me crazy, too.
She recalls a conversation they’d had on the phone this morning.
“Home.”
“Hi, Mom. How’s it going?”
“Home. You need to come home.”
“I’m going to come home and visit you this weekend, Mo-”
“No! You need to come home now. You’re not safe there- not without me.”
“Is this because of the storm?”
“...no?”
“Listen. I…I’ll come home. At five. The weather channel says it won’t start raining until seven, so it’ll be fine.”
“Okay. I guess.”
“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you too, Eva.”
Parents- we always give into them, whether we want to or not.
“What the hell?!”
Oh, right. I always forget that mortals get a bit spooked during this part.
Eva assumed her best imitation of a fighting stance before frantically whipping her head around to try and see where the voice she’d heard was coming from.
It must be a trick- some punk kid in the back was probably messing around with a speaker, making it sound like there was someone else in the shop. Yeah, yeah, that was it. Or maybe…
“Maybe I really am going crazy.” She admits, letting her raised arms fall and her fists open up.
No, you are certainly not crazy. Me, on the other hand…. Well, that’s more of a third-date conversation. Anyway, enough about me; what’s your name?
She shakes her head and clamps her hands over her ears. If she is hearing voices, she’s definitely not going to talk to them- much less answer their questions.
You’re playing that way, eh? Very well- we’ll just do this the hard way, then.
The yellowed rolls of paper on the table in front of her fall to the floor and roll open, stretching out so far they touch the tips of her shoes- which are stained red.
Shaking even harder than she had before, she tries to walk backwards- only to fall and hit the floor, her elbows just barely stopping her head from crashing against the wooden planks under her.
Toes searing with pain like fire, breathing so labored her lungs may as well give out, and pupils shrunk smaller than the tip of a needle, she watched as ink the same color as the neon sign she’d seen and the same shade as the color staining her shoes bled onto the papers in front of her, forming letters that spelt out the one name she knew all too well.
E-V-A
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