January 14, 2013

No. 284

When I worked at the Sunshine Bean, our biggest rivalry wasn’t with the Java Stop down the street. It was with the 80th Street Sunshine Bean, three blocks away. They always seemed to outperform our sales by the slightest of margins, and their reviews were always just a little bit higher.
Our sister store was, to us, a strange, unpleasant place to visit. Even though it had a similar floor plan, and the exact same decor, it was off somehow. And not just because everything was kept one drawer over to the left. The staff were, obviously, not as friendly as ours and, to be honest, we had at least four or five people a day walk into our store to have their drinks fixed that 80th Street had made wrong.
At the time, of course, we all just considered it healthy competition. It wasn’t until I’d moved on from Sunshine Bean that I began to hear rumors of what actually went down at 80th Street. I’d get messages from friends who still worked for the company. Odd messages in the middle of the night.  I found a note under the windshield wiper of my car. All the correspondence said the same thing.
“It happens at night.”
My curiosity was piqued, and one evening, well past my bedtime, I drove by the 80th Street Sunshine Bean. The lights were on, and there were people moving around inside. It was past closing, and according to standard practices, nobody should have been there. I parked around the corner, and moved closer on foot.
They were loading something into a trap door in the floor that certainly wasn’t in the plans of my store. And the something they were loading, though obscured in a large canvas sack, was squirming.
Then one of them saw me. They yelled to the others, and the entire group scattered. The lights were quickly shut off. It was too late for me to run. I pulled out my phone and pointed the camera at the storefront.
I called out into the darkness. “Let me in, or your secret gets revealed.”

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Caught!! Excellent!

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