“‘Charlene’s Haunted Crafts’ is, by no means, truly haunted. It is a Halloween store, open year-round and run entirely by the owner, an old woman named Charlene. Charlene takes it upon herself to dress as a witch might, a stereotypical witch I should say, donning a pointed hat, a velvet cloak, and a tiny pentacle pin. She maintains a distinctive character while inside the store, responding to jokes with a shrill cackle and speaking to her fat Maine Coon as though it weren’t sleeping. There are cracks in her façade if you know where to look, the witchy guise a gaudy plastering on a thing much stranger than it seems. Look carefully, reader, or do not look at all.”
One might have expected that ‘Charlene’s’ would be the sort of business that is open four days a week from 11 to 4:30 (and closed at noon for lunch). Without that personal foresight, my first visit to the little shop consisted entirely of staring in through the display windows at the tiny, orange-painted trinkets there. Having had my fill, I hefted my pack and limped off to find my own lunch.
Returning in the late afternoon I find Charlene at the register, hunched over a wooden jack-o-lantern and a small pot of black paint. Her Maine Coon watches from a shelf above, flicking its tail in tandem with the brush strokes and sniffling at the cobwebs it inadvertently pushes into the air. Neither pay me much mind as I walk the aisles and eye the layers of thick, white dust.
It is uncomfortable for me to be in a shop, on my own and without any reason but to browse. Small wooden pumpkins are low on my list of needs. I don’t have a house or a truck to celebrate Halloween in and my pack doesn’t exactly want for more weight or sharp edges. The thing is, I used to work in a little shop like this and even I could tell when somebody was looking with no intent to buy, I could tell just about right away. If Charlene has been running this place for as long as I assume she has, she probably felt me coming down the street.
“Do you paint all of these?” I ask, circling around to the front of the store and feigning interest.
She does not look up at me.
“Do you…” I begin, thinking my voice had been too quiet, “Do you paint everything in your store?”
Still nothing.
“Ma’am…”
“Oh shut up,” the woman says.
The woman behind me, that is.
I turn and see a squat woman, hardly a witch in baggy jeans and the short, pointed hairstyle tween boys and computer-savvy grandmothers begrudgingly share. She frowns at me, continues frowning, and then turns to the woman at the counter.
The woman at the counter is a doll of some sort, intricate in assembly and coloring but entirely unmoving as she hovers over the craft. The cat above her has frozen, warped, and flattened itself on the wall- a painting of a cat, an optical illusion. I move my head from side to side, step backward to the door but the cat persists in unreality. Now, from this angle, even the woman loses some of her detail.
“I thought she was alive,” I tell the new woman, “She’s…”
I hesitate before saying ‘realistic’ because now I can see the fake rubber skin and the cheap stuffing that pokes out of the seams on her wrist. The cat, above, is peeling from the wall behind them both, painted ages ago.
“In the shadows it seemed like she was real.”
“She?” the woman, Charlene, I suppose, asks.
There’s nothing at the counter but a backpack, a jacket draped off the chair. Two rolls of gift wrap lie where her arms once did, or where it seemed like they were. The cat is a water stain, the ugly type you ignore because you’re afraid of exactly how much it will cost to fix whatever is causing it. It is faintly the shape of a cat, but that could be said of anything of that size. Cats take strange shapes.
I shift onto my bad leg, reassured by the pain, and shift off again. I face Charlene.
“I think Halloween is getting to me,” I tell her, forcing a chuckle.
“Must be, we’re halfway through November.”
“It’s… snow…” I say. I say it aloud hoping it will keep the conversation going.
The shelves are covered in fake snow, not dust, and the jack o’lanterns have stacked into snowmen. I wipe my brow, nervously.
“You can’t use the restroom,” Charlene says.
“What?”
Something meows in the store and I look desperately around. The water stain has all but disappeared.
“You can’t use the restroom. Lay off the smack and get a job, it’s not too late to turn your life around.”
“I…”
“You don’t think so?”
“Well, yeah,” I say, agreeing more that a theoretical version of me, a smack-addicted version, would do well to get off the stuff. That it wouldn’t be too late.
“Off you go, then,” she says, “Best be out before I call the sheriff.”
I leave quickly because, drug-addled or not, I have reason to avoid the law. The air is colder now, the sun well on its way to our neighbor’s morning. I check my watch and see that it is November, that Halloween passed as a ghost might- quiet and disconcerting. I shiver against the cold and the psychic stress of the last few minutes, days, months.
Charlene taps on the window behind me, taps with her costume jewelry rings.
Used to be I could drive somewhere warm and shake all this off.
I start to walk, instead.
-traveler
