Giving Notice

Martin’s six-year tenure at Laurentian Hobby and Arts Supply, largely uneventful save for the occasional avant garde artiste stealing Sculpy because ‘the taboo made the clay brighter’, ended abruptly one cold December night just before Christmas.

It was close to closing time, and Martin was making his rounds of the quieting store, putting away the detritus cast aside by another day’s flood of holiday crafters. A few stragglers trickled past him towards the cashiers as he made his way to the paint aisle with a basket of brightly coloured tubes in need of returning to their homes.

He was just thinking that this end of the store was perhaps a little quiet despite the hour – even ol’ Bing Crosby seemed to have abandoned the art department – when he turned the last corner and came upon a small girl standing on her tiptoes and daubing white paint onto one of the sample pieces of artwork at the far end of the aisle with her fingers.

This kind of thing wasn’t exactly uncommon – Martin always seemed to be cleaning bits of graffiti off the displays, the shelves, just about everything – but Martin had never stumbled across anyone in the act before. He wasn’t quite sure what to do about it, truth be told.

After a long moment of watching her remain completely oblivious to his presence, Martin cleared his throat theatrically and aimed for his best non-threatening, child-friendly tone.

“Excuse me, could I get you to stop doing that please?”

The girl cast Martin a momentary, withering glance worthy of a hormonal teenager before returning to her work. Martin frowned, then tried a different tack.

“We close in a few minutes. Do you know where your parents are?”

This time the girl didn’t even bother to look away from what she was doing; she did respond, at least, but her answer threw Martin more than her behaviour.

“They’re not here yet. Won’t be long now, though.”

Martin found himself mesmerized, watching her small hand move from the little jar of paint she carried to the canvas and back again, and he hardly noticed his footsteps carrying him towards her until he was standing at her back. The girl didn’t react to his approach; instead she merely used her finger to scoop another dollop of white paint out of the jar. It was time to put a stop to this.

“Young lady, what do you think you’re doing?”

Without even looking back at Martin, the girl raised her white-tipped index finger, as if telling him to just hold on a second, then cocked her head to one side in consideration of her work. After a long moment, everything seemed to meet with her approval, and she turned and handed the little jar of bone-white paint to Martin.

“I’m giving notice,” she explained unhelpfully, seeming delighted at the puzzled expression that furrowed Martin’s brow. “The time approaches, Martin. Don’t be late.”

The girl flashed Martin a flirtatious wink, almost perverse-looking on her small face, and then started to walk away down the aisle. Martin almost followed her – to do what, he couldn’t have said – but something about the little jar of paint she’d handed him begged for his attention: it was warm in his hand. The little jar certainly looked normal enough, right down to the label bearing Laurentian’s house brand name, Perfect Palette. But whatever was inside it radiating warmth was far too gelid for acrylic paint, and it smelled sharp and acrid, like ozone after a storm.

Martin looked up, thinking perhaps to flag the little girl down, question her or something, but his gaze fell upon her handiwork and was trapped, a fly in amber.

Something like a spiral squatted in translucent bone-white atop the swirling colours of the abstract sample painting. Before Martin’s eyes, the shape slithered and writhed, an ouroboros turning back on itself. Some panicked part of Martin knew it should be static, and yet he watched it slip and shift. Something in the spiral held his gaze fast and compelled him to look, even as fat, helpless tears slipped from his unblinking eyes, even as the huge halogen bulbs that hung from the ceiling shrieked and sizzled and blinked out one by one, leaving Martin standing in darkness before the malignancy the girl had made. The twisting shape tugged at something buried deep in Martin, and suddenly he was caught in its gravity, the floor and the walls and the rest of the store crumbling away as he fell headlong into the abyss, into the whirling madness of the bone-white spiral. Only the cold stars were left to watch his descent, falling alongside him into the thing’s dark orbit – no, that wasn’t quite true; even the stars had burned away, and Martin fell towards a crack in the world through which something peered, waiting, hungry.

It was the static squawk of Martin’s walkie-talkie that started to reassemble the pieces of his shattered mind.

“Hey Martin, fall asleep somewhere? We’re all ready to go up here.”

Martin blinked his vision clear. The lights had come back on, and he was on his hands and knees before the painting, face slick with sweat and snot like he’d been crying, or throwing up. But there was no mess on the floor; only the little jar of white whatever-it-was sat steaming next to him. There was no sign of the little girl.

Martin hauled himself to his feet, leaning on the rack of paintbrushes behind him, and dragged his walkie from his belt.

“I’m, uh... I’m fine, sorry, didn’t hear my radio. I’m just... cleaning up a paint spill back here in fine arts. Give me another minute.”

“OK, need a hand, or are you good?”

Martin eyed the painting with its dripping spiral of ichor as he responded. It seemed dormant now somehow, its malignance spread and spent, at least for the moment.

“No, no, I got it. I’ll meet you up there.”

Martin hurried to the back room to fetch a garbage bag and some cleaning supplies, half-expecting the whole mess to be gone when he got back. But there it was, still crudely laid atop some mass-produced example of abstract impressionism, practically defying him to clean it up. Something about it though, something about the primal feeling of unease that crawled up his spine just standing next to it, convinced Martin that to try and remove whatever this was as if it were normal paint would be wasted effort. In the end, he decided he couldn’t bring himself to touch the thing or be near it long enough to scrub it from the sample painting. But he couldn’t just leave it where it was...

Using the garbage bag to keep from touching the canvas directly, Martin pried the sample from its shelf by its edges. He then dropped the canvas down into the bag itself, and followed it with the little jar of supposed paint. Next he deftly twisted the top of the bag closed and knotted it, taking as much care not to spill any of whatever was actually in the jar as he could while still trying to move quickly. He then gingerly hurried this strange package to the store’s back room, where the final step of his hasty plan awaited.

Every store in the outlet mall Laurentian occupied had its own garbage compactor, and it was into this waiting mechanical throat that Martin tossed the knotted garbage bag and its contents. He watched the bag disappear into the darkness with a certain satisfaction, but even still, he didn’t begin to feel something like relief until he’d slammed the compactor’s heavy metal door shut and slapped the big green button on the wall that turned the thing on. The dissonant grinding and squealing the compactor made as it worked had never sounded sweeter, thought it did seem to take on an extra edge as it reached the end of its cycle and clanged to a halt.

Martin felt satisfied that he’d destroyed the evidence of whatever it was he’d experienced, and that this was the right thing – the only thing – to do, but he was still anxious to put as much distance between himself and the store as possible. He hurried to the break room to punch out, realizing only as he gathered his things that he had no intention of ever coming back. His resolve solidified as he walked back up to the front of the store to join his waiting co-workers, and by the time he’d reached his car in the parking lot Martin had practically written his letter of resignation, complete with made-up extenuating circumstances to explain why he wouldn’t be giving two weeks’ notice. They were feeble excuses, to be sure, but Martin didn’t much care about giving proper notice at the moment, and to be honest he had half a mind to simply drive away now and never come near the store again.

All of that dissolved, however, when Martin heaved himself down behind the wheel of his little Honda Civic hatchback and shut the door on the night. The silence pressed in at him, and he saw again that black emptiness that had stared back at him from the spiral’s heart, glimpsed what waited at the margins of the world, and he wept for all the things he couldn’t change.

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