Black Friday Horror Story
Read today’s piece of flash fiction, a horrific scene that takes place at a retail store during Black Friday. Then feel free to leave a comment to discuss what you think or feel about Black Friday…
Two grown men fight over a talking doll housed inside a bright purple box directly in front of Jane.
She knows it’s the toy of the season, though she can vaguely remember what its manufactured name is. Julianne? Jasmine? Jessica? Jesse, maybe? Not that it matters to the men fighting over her anyway, or to Jane.
Jane should be working, helping the frenzied customers find thoughtful gifts, but she’s frozen in place, unable to pull her eyes away from the surreal scene unfolding before her.
One of the men is now punching the other up and down the sides of his jacketed torso with one arm, slowly and ineffectively, while the man who is being punched tries to pry the bright purple box out of his assailant’s iron one-handed grip with both of his much smaller and slipperier hands—both unvictorious.
The men are yelling obscenities they wouldn’t want the intended recipients of that coveted J-named doll to hear, but remain determined to win, no matter the cost, no matter how ridiculous they act or look.
In her periphery, Jane sees her manager, Mark. He’s standing in the pilfered electronics section next to a diminishing, wobbly stack of sixty-inch flat screens, looking over at her with an authoritative, knowing look.
He’s looking at her as if…
Wait.
Is Mark expecting her to do something about the two men brawling over the doll?
Can’t be.
Jane is only sixteen, five-foot-one, and 101 pounds soaking wet. She doesn’t know more than five yoga poses let alone any useful wrestling techniques. What does Mark think she’s supposed to do exactly? If she interferes, she’ll get hurt. A certainty, not a supposition.
Jane and Mark stare at the men again, then each other, then back at the fighting men. They’re still causing quite a scene, though no one else but Jane and Mark seem to notice or care.
A few seconds go by in slow-motion as the men chaotically unbox the doll. One of the men pulls on her left arm as the other pulls on her right leg, their loud curses flowing freely across the aisle.
Jane can hear her own pulse as Mark shakes his head. He’s obviously disappointed in her.
The raging traffic of bodies swirling in and out of the aisle— the aisle where the two grown men fighting over the doll remain deadlocked— seems impossible to traverse, but Mark runs out of patience and takes a reactive, bold step into the main aisle anyway, toward Jane.
At that precise moment, a tall, lanky woman in a rush knocks over one of the flat screens Mark’s standing next to, which in turn knocks him over.
As he struggles to stand up, Jane swears she can hear the crunch of Mark’s bones as one of the woman’s bedazzled combat boots lands on his left wrist. The woman doesn’t register her own act of violence, dashing off with her contraband, her boots sparkling underneath the offensively bright lighting, before Jane can fully process what happened.
Nonetheless, Jane tries to leave her side of the aisle to get Mark, and the contorted shape of his body, some help. But as she steps forward, an elbow inside a blue windbreaker snatching a second-to-last special edition multiplayer game off a shelf in front of her slams smack into the center of her left eye.
She crouches down in pain, cupping her swelling, soon-to-be-black eye with one hand, stuck where she is until the unruly crowd dies down twenty minutes later.
Mark howls in agony, remaining splayed out on the floor the entire time he and Jane are immobilized.
No one apologizes for Jane’s and Mark’s injuries or stops to help them.
No one even stops to ask where they might find a particular so-and-so or such-and-such for one of their bratty kids.
The only person who talks to Jane in the twenty-or-so-minute interval of barbaric and carnivalesque mayhem is a woman who is irate that the last J-named doll is unboxed, naked, dirty, decapitated, and delimbed on the floor.
The irate woman spits as she shouts at Jane without taking a breath, without a glimmer of civility, with nothing but hot hostility emanating from her eyes.
But Jane can’t respond, as she’s been rendered mute.
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