Creeps, Anonymous

Chapter 1 - Supermarket Birthday Cake

There is a part in Pink Floyd's Shine On, You Crazy Diamond, a little more than four minutes in, that makes Olivia feel like she is standing alone on a frozen tundra, thousands of miles away from any other human contact, watching a cold dawn bloom over the horizon.

It's a creeping feeling that she's lulled into by the mystique of the keyboard intro, which suddenly gives away into a deliciously somber, resolved loneliness. It's hard to describe this feeling to anyone without sounding crazy, or, in her case--without giving away that she's crazy.

Olivia squinted across the road, at the boarded-up buildings that stood empty since last year. The layers of notices and graffiti were beginning to have its way with them, creeping up the shop fronts like sprawling lichen.

She warded off the damp cold of Bay Street by taking one last puff of her fading cigarette and then tossed it into the puddle at her feet. Back inside the employee break room, it smelled like spoiled milk and someone's tuna lunch. For once, she felt grateful for the extra layer of her mask, sliding it over both ears.

Through the double doors, the late-week dinner rush was beginning to slow down, and she felt a small prick of relief at the sight of near-empty aisles. People acted sort of unpredictably in public nowadays--especially in stores--so her new norm was trying to hide in plain sight for eight hours and hope no one was coming to yell at her about toilet paper.

Trudging back to the cereal aisle, she returned to the half-undone shipment palette, using her old boxcutter to slice through the rest of the plastic wrap. At least when everyone went back home to their lives, they'd leave the store empty enough to recoup up after the day's madness.

She liked to grab as many boxes as possible in her long arms and tried to slide as many of them as she could onto the emptied shelves. It was a challenge she'd give herself to pass the time and make the task a bit more fun. Sometimes Olivia would drop the boxes if she grabbed one too many, and they'd all come crashing down onto her boots. Eventually, there'd be no boxes left, and she'd move down an aisle, to the boxed rice and cooking oils.

But tonight, it was unpacking night for their Halloween merchandise. Tonight wouldn't quite go like every other night usually did. Olivia heaved a sigh and pulled the crumpled display planner out of her apron pocket. She tried to make out her manager's scrawled glyphs on the paper.

Some of it looked like face towards costumers--frankly it could have been customers, with her manager it was always hard to know for sure.

Using the guide in broad swaths only, Olivia built out the bottom of the pyramid of Spooky Boo Berry and Count Chocula boxes. She looked down at the guide and grimaced when she realized something was missing.

Count Chocula cut-out placed in the center. She looked around at the mess of plastic wrapping and cardboard, holding the box cutter in one hand and the crumpled guide in the other. "Shit."

It wasn't there. Olivia dug through the sliced up piles of wrap, searching for the count. He was nowhere to be found. She leaned back on her heels, shaking her head. After the nightmare of the entire pandemic, now Count Chocula couldn't even show up for her cringy, cardboard cereal pyramid. Well, whatever.

It wasn't like Count Chocula was the only man who couldn't be bothered to make an appearance in her life. Her dad was currently beating him by eight months and some change. But who was counting anymore.

She pursed her lips and headed to the back, searching through the unpacked palettes to see if the count had slipped through the packaging and fallen. Nothing there, either. She cursed, pushing back through the double doors and headed back to clean up the aisle. When she did, she stumbled across Dimitry Tarasenko, standing in the middle of her mess of an aisle, hands on his hips.