September 11, 2017 | Occasus | Issue 7 | Fiction
Alyson and the Haunting of the Home Decorating Store
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Alyson had always found ghosts in houses, but never before in a home decorating store. Perhaps, she thought, picking up the pillow from the floor which had just been thrust off the shelf in front of her, this is where the ghosts begin. Perhaps they stick themselves to the bottoms of dinner plates, wine glasses, and coffee tables and ride easily into their new homes, tucked in the trunk of a car or beside the receipt in a plastic bag. In Alyson’s experience, however, ghosts had always been more attached to people than things, so the theory of them hitchhiking on candlesticks and dinnerware seemed unlikely.
She decided in that moment, while hugging the pillow to her chest and peering down the next aisle in search of other displaced items—to discover, if she were lucky, where the ghost was headed—that, though she had never encountered a home-decorating-store ghost before, she would treat it just the same as all the rest. She pushed the pillow back onto the shelf, flattened her apron down against her stomach and tried to ignore her manager watching her through the plastic glassware on the other side of the store, her bleached hair giving her hiding spot away as it swelled above the stem-less wineglasses. Alyson moved to adjust a cushion on the sofa beside her, but it was too late: her manager glided over and rested her hand on the arm of the sofa. A pinched smile played across her painted lips. “Alyson,” she said, “what are you doing?” Alyson rolled the strings of her apron around her fingers. “I’m neatening,” she replied. “Rearranging the pillows.” “Really?” “Really.” “Hm,” her manager squeaked. She folded her arms across her tiny chest. “That’s odd, because I thought I saw you throw a pillow off the shelf. That doesn’t seem like neatening to me.” “Throw a pillow off the shelf?” said Alyson. Then she began to laugh. “No, no, that wasn’t me. That was the ghost.” “The ghost?” Her manager’s eyebrows lifted nearly to her blonde hairline, stretching out the wrinkles around her eyes. “Yes,” said Alyson. “I’ve encountered it a few times now. I thought at first the store was built on a poor foundation, that it was tilted and that’s why things kept sliding off the shelves. But I couldn’t believe that after the pillow came flying out in front of me. It was too purposeful, too—” “Alyson,” her manager interrupted. “Yes?” “Please get back to work.” She lowered her eyebrows and let her eyes relax back into the deep, mascaraed pockets above her cheekbones. Alyson sighed. She turned away, laced her fingers behind her back, and began pacing the aisles. As she walked she looked for further signs of the ghost. “What, afraid of me now?” she whispered, jabbing her head around a corner in an attempt to catch the ghost unawares, but instead frightening a woven laundry basket out of an elderly woman’s hands. She moved along quickly. “Afraid of me now I know you’re here?” No one answered. No ghost manifested, not near the garden statues or the coasters or the wall clocks. Not even, surprisingly, near the cash register (in Alyson’s experience, electronics had always been more susceptible to haunting). Only her manager appeared there. “Alyson,” she said, making Alyson drop the roll of tape she had been fiddling with. “Are you looking for something?” “Why, yes,” said Alyson, ready to explain once more about the ghost and how really important it was to gain control over these types of supernatural behaviours before they grew too powerful. Then she saw the look on her manager’s face and simply said, “The scissors. I was looking for the scissors.” “Right behind you, Alyson.” Her manager pointed to the counter where three pairs of black scissors lay in a pile. “Oh, yes, of course,” said Alyson. She plucked a pair up and clicked it together in her hand, twice. “Hiding in plain sight.” Her manager watched her as she retreated back to the pillow wall, the scissors swinging by her side. “The tags have all been chopped off!” Alyson’s manager brandished the pillow in front of her, swinging it so viciously that two sequins popped off its decorated cover and fluttered to the floor. “We’ll have to re-price every one.”
The two assistant managers, who had also been called to the staffroom, gasped simultaneously. “Every one?” said the first, who was small and had hair cropped like a curtain around her head. “But it can’t be!” said the second, who, though taller than the first, had the same high-pitched voice and delicate fingernails. “I’m afraid it can be, and it is,” said the head manager. “Well, not every one,” said Alyson, who had remained silent until this moment, examining the discarded sequins on the floor. All three managers turned to look at her. “It must be a rather short ghost,” she continued, “because it couldn’t reach the top shelf. I checked.” The assistant managers swallowed and glanced anxiously at one another. The head manager, however, maintained her stolid expression and folded her hands quietly in her lap. “Alyson,” she said slowly, “that is quite enough.” “These ghosts can be clever, you know,” said Alyson, looking from one manager to the next. “My being framed isn’t out of the question. In fact, it’s nearly a certainty. In my experience—” “In your experience?” drawled the head manager, her hands tightening in her lap. “If you must know, my mother was a ghost hunter. I used to go around with her to different sites to give her a hand. She always said I was very talented, very naturally perceptive. But it’s not something I’d want to put on a resume, now, is it?” The assistant managers were gaping at her, and two red spots had appeared on the head manager’s pale cheeks. “Alyson,” she said, “there are no such things—” “Now,” said Alyson, throwing her hands into the air, “don’t say that. You’ll only—” “Alyson.” Her manager’s mouth had shrunk to a fine line on her face, her nostrils flared above. “I would suggest that you remain quiet. We’ve decided to give you another chance. You’ve worked with us successfully for three weeks now, and we would hate for one… incident to ruin the relationships we’ve so carefully built and fostered with you.” The assistant managers were nodding in unison, their chins nearly slapping their wrinkled necks. “However,” her manager continued, “you will be doing all the re-pricing. I’ve already scheduled you shifts specifically to do so. And, of course, there will be no more mention of ghosts.” She shuddered to say the word. Alyson frowned but consented. She didn’t look at the assistant managers, who were still nodding, or the head manager, who had resettled into her robotic smile, as she left the staffroom. None of the managers noticed, as they were all focused on Alyson’s atrociously untucked shirt, that the discarded sequins followed behind her out the door—perhaps from a change in the direction of the overhead fan, but then again, perhaps not—gliding soundlessly along the tiles and out onto the sales floor. On Thursday the extra receipt paper went missing from the drawer beside the cash register and was found later that evening in place of the toilet paper in the women’s washroom. On Friday one of the assistant managers discovered that the napkins and table runners had all been folded against their creases, and on Saturday a customer complained about the swear words which had been scrawled on the chalkboard in the back corner of the store. On Sunday, when vicious rap played over the loudspeaker instead of the usual soft pop music, the head manager sent Alyson home in a fury.
Alyson protested—she had only been inconspicuously sniffing candles in the fragrance section—but soon left, shrugging and confused. As she walked to the bus stop she was tempted to curse the ghost, but she knew better, and didn’t. Even though she was no longer in the store, she knew it could be dangerous to think badly of the ghost. Ghosts were fragile creatures, after all, and this one seemed verging on furious. Alyson was re-pricing pillows after hours, her manager back in the staffroom working on the next week’s schedule, when the first wineglass slid off the shelf and shattered onto the floor. Alyson stiffened, her red marker poised to draw the dollar sign on a clearance tag, and slowly turned around. The other side of the store was trembling. The wooden shelves shook in their brackets and the dinnerware tapped lightly together, tinkling audibly now that the pop music had been turned off for the day. As she tucked the red marker away and crept closer, a dinner plate flew like a Frisbee over the dining table in the corner and smashed against the wall.
Alyson spread her arms as if for an embrace. “I know you’re troubled,” she began, and then was struck in the back of the head by something large and soft. It was a pillow, she saw as she turned around—the pillow with the missing sequins. “Hey!” she said, picking it up and rubbing the back of her head. More pillows flew at her from the shelf and she deflected them with the first. “Hey, hey!” Then she was laughing and throwing pillows over sofas and armchairs, loveseats and end tables. The lining broke on one and exploded in a spray of white feathers. Alyson caught them as they fell; she put them in her hair. And still the glasses were crashing down behind her and the paintings were splitting down the middle and the garden statues were cracking and the seat cushions were changing places with the napkins and the candles had all caught fire. Alyson’s manager came stumbling out of the staffroom with her hands over her ears and saw Alyson playing in the feathers from the pillows. She started to scream. “Oh, it’s horrible!” she said, pulling at her hair. “Alyson, Alyson, Alyson!” Alyson watched as her manager ran for the front door, tripping over a rug which dropped across her path. A coaster flew from the other side of the store and struck her on the forehead, splitting her skin and causing blood to roll down over her eyes. Alyson giggled. “It matches her lipstick,” she whispered. A pillow flopped down onto her head and she pulled it off, hugging it to her chest. Her manager wiped her eyes and shrieked. She had reached the front door, and she looked back wildly at the store crashing down around her. “Alyson!” she screeched one last time, and then was gone out into the night. The moment the door closed behind her, the store shuddered to a halt. The wineglasses—or what was left of them—steadied themselves on the shelves, the pillows deflated and relaxed, and the candles went out, fine trails of smoke climbing up from their wicks to the ceiling. “Well,” Alyson said aloud, “she has to believe me now, doesn’t she?” Nothing answered. Her voice echoed around the empty store, touching each broken object and landing quietly on each misplaced product. Nothing moved but her heaving chest. She sat in the pile of pillows, pulling feathers out of her hair. “She has to believe me,” she murmured. But now Alyson couldn’t remember if she had thrown the first wineglass or the ghost had, and there was still a red mark along her wrist where the rug had scraped her as she pushed it in front of her manager. “She has to,” she repeated. Only silence answered. Only silence and the whine of distant sirens, drawing closer through the dark outside. Alyson stood and began pushing the pillows back onto the shelves. Slowly, meticulously, she built her wall of plush up again. |
ERICA MCKEEN is a writer of poetry and fiction, with a particular focus on the weird and twisted. Her work has appeared in the 2014, 2015, and 2016 issues of Occasus, multiple issues of The Quilliad, Minola Review, Shirley Magazine, and other publications. Her short story, 'Our Eyes, Our Tongue,' won the 2016 Lillian Kroll prize in creative writing. She has worked with the Toronto-based poet Catriona Wright in the event, 'Couplets,' a collaborative poetry reading series, in June 2017.
