What Goes On in the Back

Something was pretty obviously wrong. The clouds hanging in the sky were too heavy. The cars were driving fast, oh so fast. They clearly had never read all of the manuals about driving in bad weather, Kevin thought to himself, tucking his pinkened nose further into his scarf. His hat drew down low over his face, all but obscuring his eyes. He was violently thrown back into the memories of his childhood, his mother leering over him, chiding him on his temperature and dress, because he’d be “too cold dressed like that, look at all that skin exposed”. He hadn’t understood her and her concerns then, but, oh boy, did he understand now. 

The weatherman had said that it was going to snow. The concerned look that had been scrawled across his face like a terrible child’s cartoon exposed the lies that his mouth was telling about the nice, couple inches that was coming. The station told more extreme versions of the weather before (‘extreme’ in this instance meaning ‘indications of the end of days’), believing fully everything that they were saying, and then, when the more milder weather rolled through like an unfortunate joke, they sat back with egg on their faces wondering what had happened, forced to publicly apologize. This time, they were just going with the herd of well dressed weather-seagulls, squawking out the same cheap phrases. A few, nice, fluffy inches. That’s all. Just a couple, soft, picturesque inches of snow. It didn’t take a fool to see the apocalypse that lay behind the terrified weatherman’s eyes. It tried to masquerade as anger, vehement distaste over being silenced, but it was quite apparently fear. Of course, as they were the only station spouting fire and brimstone, Kevin took himself to the supermarket, just as he had originally planned. He was from the grand, old North. A little snow would do him good, seep into his bones and strengthen them, like water through….nope, nevermind. It would do him good. Of course, there were no good feelings as he trudged through the biting wind that made his eyes into tiny fountains that could but weep. 

He had never been happier than when he saw the grocery store looming on the corner. He had, of course, but at that time he was hard pressed to remember any. Fumbling with the door was the turning point in his existence, the moment when he wasn’t sure that he would actually make it, his nearly frostbitten hands (they were just a little numb) struggling to grip the chunk of metal stuck to the door (in a less dramatic state, he would have called it a ‘handle’), pushing with all his might against the wind, nearly giving up to the despair and the harsh, winter winds, and then realizing and the door said ‘pull’ and casually stepping into the store, hoping no strangers had seen anything. However, he was a man of the North and he could handle a little cold. It wouldn’t break him, just make him stronger. 

The first odd thing that he noticed was that there were baskets. Being the only grocery store in a small town that bordered on being normal sized with four functional baskets, it was generally a race to see who could get one that actually worked. This time, all four were sitting there, untouched. Kevin didn’t overthink it. You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, right? He only had a few things to get, and he wasn’t going to turn back into the cold while his hands were still blocks of ice frozen onto his poor, mangled arms (kind of chilly). 

Kevin’s routes were engraved into his memory. He knew them better than he knew his own face. Everything in his life was maximized for efficiency, and the grocery store was no different. He knew that he needed certain things, and he knew where those things were, so why not plan out the routes that would take the least amount of time? The store was generally fairly crowded (not today, but he chocked that one up to the poor weather) so he was without a doubt going in with a plan. It would be complete and utter mayhem if he didn’t. 

The basket slowly filled as he ran his route. He could shake the feeling that there was something different about the store, the entire evening even. Maybe it was just that it wasn’t crowded. Maybe it was that the cheesy, overproduced music wasn’t playing. Maybe it was just the impending bad weather that lay heavy on the shoulders like a thick, wool sweater that snuggly gripped the neck in a less than pleasant way. Maybe it was that he couldn’t stop feeling like there were eyes on him, no matter where he went. Sometimes it was just one set of eyes; sometimes it was several. The feeling got heavier as he went along and he would have been lying if he said that he hadn’t turned around at least once, but could you blame him? A winter storm turned out to be the perfect time to shop though. He had yet to see one person in the store with him, but he could hear something rustling in the aisles as he went along, so he was sure that there was someone else. They were just always… out of… view….

Finally, list satisfied, he turned back onto the long, main aisle that led up to the checkout lines. A fan of the self- checkout, he never wanted to have to make the awkward small talk that going through the regular checkout lines promised. It was much better to have to go through the process of scanning his items himself. It wasn’t that much of a hassle. Also, come to think about it, had there been anyone at the registers when he had walked in? Unprofessional. He would have to remember to leave a complaint with the manager of the store when he came back. 

That feeling was back and stronger than ever. The main passageway through the store felt like it was stretching, getting longer and longer, the more steps that he took, the more steps were added to the other end. He wanted to run. It was a feeling that grabbed him deep in his stomach and tried to drag him faster and faster. He was about halfway through when he heard it. The sound was hard to place, and he rocketed past its owner the first time, having to reluctantly double back, all the while fighting with himself as he tried to think about whether or not this was absolutely necessary, but it sounded like a baby crying. He couldn’t leave a baby alone in the store in a storm, now, could he? Sighing heavily, he backtracked, feeling somewhere deep in his gut that something wasn’t right the further back that he went. 

There, in the middle of your average, unassuming aisle, lay a baby, swaddled heavily to protect against the chill of the supermarket. Kevin could barely see the child’s face (not that he really wanted to- Kevin was not what you would call ‘good with children’. In general they tended to make him itchy). There was no sound but the quiet snuffling of the baby and the wail of the wind through the thick, grocery store walls as Kevin approached, slowly, as if coming upon a bomb. It appeared to be a rather large baby, again, not that Kevin really would have known. The last time he had seen a baby, he had called his sister’s baby ‘rather wrinkly...like a primate!’, and learned the hard way that that was not the correct thing to say to a new mother proud of her spawn as he was given the boot from her nice, upstate New York suburban home. 

The noises that emerged from Kevin’s throat were none that he had ever made before. He assumed that they were made in the intent of comforting the child, but as they were scaring even him, they quickly ceased. He quickly filed those in the ‘never again’ folder in the back of his head. Close enough to touch but not close enough to see its face, he gently reached out a hand, trying to flip back some of the swaddling when he hesitated. Hadn’t he read that birds would give up their young if they saw people getting all up and personal with them? Maybe this was one of those situations. Maybe the mother had seen Kevin and ran away! He shook his head, trying to get rid of the bad ideas. People weren’t birds. People. Not birds. The storm was certainly giving him strange ideas, wasn’t it? It was a baby. Man up. He could handle it. 

It was during this interesting pep talk that the hand grabbed his wrist. He would have expected a chubby, baby hand, but this was a smaller version of one of his own hands, hairy on the knuckles with large joints, worn nails (what was that under them?) and rough pads on the fingers. This was a working hand. A man’s hand. Kevin paused a moment, and with that moment, lost his chance to run. 

“Got another one, boys!” a deep voice yelled, triumphantly. The ‘baby’ threw off the swaddling, revealing a gnome-like scale version of a man, a real lumberjack-like fellow. He had Kevin in a vice grip, although that wasn’t necessary, in truth. The poor man was dumbfounded, staring at the little man that was standing where in place there had once been a baby. Or had appeared to be a baby. Looked like a baby. Not baby. Lies. 

As if by magic, the aisle filled full of these tiny, lumberjack men, distinguishable from each other only by the plaid that adorned their torsos. Now, shocked by the sights surrounding him, Kevin began to  struggle, trying to fight the somehow stronger fellow that was maybe a third of his height. This was a battle that he was going to lose. The small man grinned at him with narrowed eyes full of malice and a pure joy known only by those who can tap into that something deep, dark, and treacherous. In the hand not clasped around Kevin’s wrist, he raised something heavy and aluminum, a can, something grabbed off a nearby shelf. Everything was a weapon if you were creative enough. This just happened to be creamed corn, and creamed our unfortunate Kevin was. The small gnome driving the can down into his skull was the last thing Kevin saw before the world blinked out. 

The room slowly came into focus, not the aisle of before, but a new one, the storage room in the back (NOT accessible to customers). It was covered in these rusty brown stains, swirling in mesmerizing patterns down into the drain in the center of the floor. Not needing to be told what those were, Kevin tried with feeble, sleepy limbs to work his way toward the light that he knew was the door. 

They knew what he was doing, though. Of course they knew. This now was their domain. Surrounded by a circle of dark shapes with eyes reflecting the cold, dim light of the storage room, Kevin curled into a tight ball and tried to ignore the tarp that lay behind them, the sludge-like pool that it was laying in, and whatever fate lay in store for him as the wind and the snow shrieked a cacophony outdoors.