Life, Love, and the Pursuit of Lawn Ornaments

Monica could hear the shouting from paper goods.

I had this idea a while back and decided to go with it. Much fun was had.

(October 15, 2016)

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There’s a commotion on aisle nine. Seasonal, Grocery.

It’s not a surprise. There have been similar commotions on aisle nine since the beginning of the month.
Monica wonders briefly if accepting the position of assistant shift manager had been wise. After three weeks of it, an extra dollar fifty an hour didn’t exactly seem worth it. Not to mention it wasn’t even anywhere near Thanksgiving or black Friday yet. This was just a taste of what she had coming to her.

She can hear the shouting from paper goods.

“No. No. No. NO. NO!”

“But think of it this way! All the little kids’ll be so excited, they’ll tell all their little friends—”

“—And all their little friends’ll come running. I know, you told me already a hundred times!”

“Then we’re in agreement! It’s a wise investment.”

“No!”

“You were wrong about the computer thing! You know that! We own a house now because—”

“Are you ever gonna let that go! Yes! I was wrong about the computer thing, but a twenty-count case of one-pound chocolate bars is not the same thing!”

“You gotta look at it from my perspective—”

“God forbid!”

“Would you just relax!”

“What is this stuff?”

“It’s an inflatable dragon. And that one’s a haunted carriage! The kids’ll love it!”

“What the hell are you planning to do? Run a haunted house through the back yard! This-this is ri-ridiculous! I’m not paying two—TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS for a blow-up nightmare coach!”

“I got a Groupon!”

“Oh, he’s got a Groupon! Well, that makes everything different!”

Eddie is standing at the end of the adjacent aisle with his hands tucked under his chin. He’s seventeen, a handful of years younger than Monica. A tall, scrawny, gangly thing with ginger brown hair and freckles. He’s trying to disperse a crowd of customers that’s growing, watching the… showdown.

It’s two men. Older. The taller of which is wearing a green v-neck over khakis and a wind breaker. He has thinning grayish hair and a goatee with a permanent line of disapproval between his eyes.

The shorter of the two is wearing worn out Nikes, ratty jeans, a threadbare red t-shirt with ‘Coach’ on the front in white, and has a neon pink cast on his left arm. Someone’s drawn some flowers on it in black sharpie. He’s gesticulating wildly with a bag of popcorn balls and every so often shoves his glasses back up his nose, or pushes a hank of curly silver hair away from his face.

Monica has seen them around the store before, they’re kind of hard to miss.

The last time she’d personally seen them for more than half a second in passing, had been in the spring. The shorter of the two had been sitting backwards in the basket of the shopping cart with a pair of children’s furry rabbit ears on his head and a five-pound sack of Matzo Meal on his lap. He’d looked tired, but pleased with himself, a half-eaten plum in one hand, his cell phone in the other. His companion looked haggard even then, piling produce on top of and around him. Trying to pretend he didn’t know there was a fully-grown man in his cart, while attempting to hide behind his sunglasses and the collar of his jacket. Like a parent hoping to finish the grocery shopping before their child lost interest in the angry birds.

They were the neighborhood eccentrics. Or so Monica’s manager had proclaimed them; Stephen said they’d been in the area for as long as he could remember.

“This is pointless!”

“It’s not pointless!”

“How many—”

“It’s for the kids!”

“—How many kids did you even have come to the door last year, huh? How—”

“Oh, don’t start!”

“—HOW MANY! Four? Six, tops?”

“Nine!” The curly one says triumphantly as if three kids were so much of a big difference and shoves a finger at the bigger man’s chest. “And they came for the CANDY and the fun decorations, not the-the-the—” He shakes the bag under the other’s nose; “Sugar Free Popcorn balls!”

“I don’t care how many kids you had last year. We are not buying a case of one-pound candy bars! And we’re not buying inflatables! No! This is a waste of money!”

“It’s not a waste of—”

“It is a pointless waste of money!”

Monica paused near the men and cleared her throat, tried to put on her strongest professional voice possible; “Excuse me… Can I help you, gentlemen?”

They both turned to her and smiled. Charming, handsome smiles with blue eyes only a few shades in difference.

“Hi,” The shorter one said. “Can we get a case of—”

“Yes, actually, you can help!” The bigger one said, as if Monica were sent by angels or something, just to rescue him. “If you wouldn’t mind, we’ve decided against these… things,” He motions to the big boxes in the shopping cart.

“No, we haven’t!”

“We’re not paying two-hundred fifty dollars for a balloon.”

His eyes narrow behind his glasses and he shoves the popcorn balls back onto the shelf with a brutal kind of finality; “Look!” He grabs the bigger man’s arm and drags him back over to the overflowing cart, unfolds a piece of paper from his pocket and slaps it down on the nearest box. “Look! See that! Half off! HALF OFF!” He thumps the box with his uninjured fist, digs awkwardly in his pocket and pulls out his customer loyalty card. “Plus, another fifteen because it’s Saturday!”

“I don’t give two shits if it’s senior Saturday, you are not buying all this!”

Their voices are raised again, faces twisting, hands and fingers jabbing wildly;

“You’re not even gonna be there to see it! You’re gonna be sittin’ in your office reading like you’ve done the last six years! What do you care if I decorate the yard!”

“Decorating is one thing! This? This is not decorating, this is an obsession! You are obsessed!”

“I am not!”

“You’re obsessed with these blow-up monstrosities! How many of them do you already have!”

“I dunno… a couple, but that’s besi—”

“You’ve got the blow-up bunny that comes outta the egg,” He starts ticking them off on his fingers, “The Santa that gets stuck in the chimney. The snow globe with Snoopy and the Peanuts in it. The light up reindeer that move and scare the dog. The flashy lights that play music! The-the turkey! You have a ten-foot turkey in a pilgrim hat!”

“I don’t have any for Halloween!”

“You have that weird zombie door-knocker thing with the googly eyes that springs out at people and almost gave me a heart attack! And the motion sensor flashing eyeballs you put under the porch! Ziggy is still scared to death to come up the front stairs, thank you very much! Not to mention the creepy Exorcist girl that you hang on the side of the house! The one that gives you nightmares?”

“It’s a Victorian! We have to take advantage of it! And she only gave me nightmares because you put her in the attic and I went up there lookin’ for that noise I told you about and thought we had a homunculus livin’ in our crawl space!”

“You screamed like a little girl—”

“Well you would too if you saw crazy hunched up thing starin’ at you when you’ve been hearin’ creepy attic noises all night!”

“My point is, you don’t need any more decorations! You have plenty! This has gone past novelty into a damned obsession and I’ve had enough!”

“But, look how cool they are!”

“You are a four-year-old! No, you’re WORSE than a four-year-old!”

“Will you just look at it! It lights up, has a timer so you can set it to come on automatically. Look! See? Color changing LEDs! So, I don’t have to change the bulbs every year! And the wheels turn, and the horses gallop, and a ghost comes outta the top of the carriage!”

The other man’s hands come up as if he’s fighting with himself not to choke the other; “It is a Giant. Balloooon! The wind’ll catch it just like it did the Grinch you put on the roof last year, and we’ll find it around the forth of July hung in a-in a tree somewhere three miles away! Or it’ll blow out to sea and choke a fr-freakin’ whale to death!”

“It’s got tie downs, and sand ballasts! Look! See? It anchors. This baby ain’t goin’ nowhere!”

The bigger man’s eyes rolled back in his head. Voice lowered to a warning, pleading tone; “Starsky—”

Glasses sighed, growled almost, shoulders sagging. “Can I get the dragon at least?”

Arms crossed, jaw set. He looked like he could stare down anything. Maybe he had.

“Come on, look—It breathes fire!”

The tall one looked like he was getting a migraine. Monica wondered if they’d completely forgotten she was there.

“I can use it for more than just Halloween! Put a Santa hat on it, or some ears and—”

The bigger man’s hands covered his face with an audible sigh.

“It’s a DRAGON! That show you like’s got dragons in it! And it’s only a hundred bucks!”

“’Only a hundred bucks!’ he says, ‘only, only’. A hundred bucks is a lot of money, pal!”

“I’ll make it worth your while,” Glasses narrowed his eyes suggestively, wagged his eyebrows.

“Jesus, not in front of—” He motioned with a flat palm, scanned Monica’s nametag; “—You’re old enough to be her grandfather!”

“You take that back!”

“You know what’s going to happen, right? You’re going to spend all this money, and you’ll sit there all evening waiting, and waiting, and you’ll only get five or six kids if you’re lucky. Then you’ll be disappointed and pouty all night and I’ll have to deal with you! Then you’ll start with your ideas for next year, you’ll have this big extravagant plan to lure more trick-or-treaters in with bigger decorations, and bigger candy, and you’ll still only get kids from the center, or the neighbor’s grandson. Then you’ll be heartbroken, the same as you were last year! And I’ll have to clean up the mess, yet again!”

Glasses is quiet, expression calmly neutral, though his shoulders seem somehow to have sagged a little, his frame diminished.

The tall one heaves a sigh, runs a hand down the length of his face.

For a full five seconds, they were completely silent, gazing at one another. Each passing second the tall one’s face got redder, and his eyes became more uncomfortable, regretful, angry with himself—

“Oh, for the love of—” His face was red now, from trying to hold down the volume of his voice; “Get the candy. Get the frickin’ dragon! But I swear to god if that thing isn’t used for every single holiday I’m using it to patch the tent!”

This seemed to be exactly what he’d wanted all along because Glasses snatched the handle of the cart and turned toward Lawn and Garden, “Ooo, you know what? Know what! They’ve got one with a cat that pops up, it’s only seventy-five. And a witch with a cauldron that makes fog! And there’s this spooky archway thing, but I didn’t really like it. OH! And a Frankenstein’s Monster that moves its arms— And they’ve already got some of the pre-lit Christmas trees in!”

Monica heard the taller one muttering as he passed, following his partner; “Look at him—the smug little shit—struts around like he’s king of the world. When he makes me come out two days before Halloween because he’s eaten all the candy I will buy prunes and toothbrushes— That’ll teach him.”

Eddie was still standing at the mouth of the aisle looking dumbfounded. He shrugged, and the throng of other customers slowly began to dissipate.

Monica shook her head and went to warn the cashiers.