-It is spring. The clouds churn and a siren wails in the distance. In the swirl of the vortex, you see eyes. Maybe this winter’s sacrifices will keep those eyes off of your little town.

-the deer here are huge, fed on corn, unafraid of your car as it comes careening down a country backroad. You stop to let the deer cross, its eyes glistening red as it stares you down. You look to the floor of your vehicle; it is unwise to look into the deers’ eyes.

-the woods are barricaded, fences and barbed wire and “no trespassing” signs surrounding that little patch of forest in the state park. “There are things in those woods that should not exist,” the ranger tells you, before turning and disappearing into the darkness.

-“HELL IS REAL” the billboard loudly proclaims. Hell is an endless country road, winding through corn fields and past empty barns and broken homes, the ghosts of the lost crossing to wander aimlessly. Hell is not real, but purgatory is.

-A little produce stand pops up on the corner at the intersection every weekend. No one is seen coming or going; the stand is there one minute and gone the next. You crave tomatoes, so you stop in, just for a minute. The tomatoes bleed, metallic and crimson, and the corn bites with jagged teeth.

-the strawberry festival was pleasant, but with the sweet corn festival comes the entities from the corn fields. Dark shadows that quickly dart behind trees and buildings. An entity jumps into a middle-aged woman nearby. She turns and stares at you with yellow eyes.

-your next-door neighbor speaks to you in an accent you swore you only heard one time in a dream. Your neighbor down the street speaks to you in an accent familiar to you from the corn fields. You meet a man from New York, who comments on your own accent, and you can only respond in eldritch gobbledegook.

-it is fall, and the trees begin to change. From yellow, to brown, and then to blood red. The leaves break under your feet, soft and wet and leaving bloody smears on the pavement.

-It’s been more than ten years since God struck Touchdown Jesus down in a ball of flame. A new statue has taken its place, hands outstretched. As the years pass, the distance between the statue’s hands decreases, a countdown to something, but nobody knows what. Who will God strike down next?

-You pull into a gas station somewhere on the long winding road between towns; they pop up from time to time, usually at around half a tank of gas. It’s not wise to let your tank get any lower. There’s a monitor on the pump as you fill your tank. “Repent,” it tells you. “Cleanse the world of its sins.” You look around. Four people are at other pumps, the yellow of the cornfield shadows flickering in their eyes. They each hold a lighter, flames dancing in the breeze. They stare at you, as the image on the monitor bursts into flame, into sweet cleansing fire. You cap your gas tank and drive away. You don’t feel like cleansing sin today.

-You’re leaving for better opportunities in another state, eager to leave Ohio long behind you. Two hours in the car. Five hours. Ten hours. After twelve hours, you find yourself pulling right back into your hometown. All roads lead right back to Ohio.

-A soccer mom approaches your register, demanding in a low demonic voice that you call over your manager. Her eyes are charcoal black, dark empty pits devoid of a soul. She is upset and blood must be spilled, and your manager makes an excellent sacrifice.

-A customer asks if you have an item in the back, to which you insist that the store tries to keep all of its stock out on the floor. The customer insists that you check the back. The stock room is a black void, from which few have had the courage to enter, and fewer returned alive. You grab your weapon and hold your breath before going through those doors.

-The turnover rates are high; the beasts in the void have to be fed somehow.

-You train the new kid on the registers. Two months down the road, he doesn't show up for work, lost to the void in the back room. A week later, you train the same kid on the registers, eyes still full of life, ignorant of his inevitable fate.

-The special of the day in the deli is a pasta salad; a steal of a price that sells more in an hour than in your last century here. You scoop out a spoonful into a deli cup for the next customer, the pasta-like maggots writhing unnoticed.

-The store at night exists in a separate realm. One in which flickering fluorescent lights struggle to fight off the creeping darkness, and tempting whispers slip out from under the clothing racks.

-You tune out the customer screaming at you over an incorrect price. It has been centuries, and you have no soul left to care. The shadows lingering outside the exit nullify angry temperaments the second a person exits the building, siphoning their soul up as they've done to you all those years ago.

-You enter the store on your off-day, looking to grab a few things. You walk out the exit and find yourself back inside the store. The store owns you, body and soul. You can never leave.

-The higher-ups from corporate are coming today; the creatures in the void must be fed, and the store must be cleaned down to the last detail. Corporate will always find the blood stains with their many-eyed stare.

-On black friday, the customers slither in from the darkness, slipping past the wards you put up for this occasion. Nobody mentions the trampled corpses littered around the store, or the serpentine creatures that feed from them.

-“You should smile more,” a middle-aged woman says to you. You stare at her with dead eyes. You open your mouth to respond, sucking in air and bitter, entitled life forces. You take the woman's advice and smile at her; after all, you should share the nice day you're having, because she'll never again smile and enjoy it.

-The shoplifter runs for the doors, sending the alarms blaring and knocking the doors off their hinges. The guardians hiss, and with a scream, the thief is gone. Vanished. All that's left is a single shoe, and the stolen merchandise that fell to the floor

-Grey and white, the tiles on the floor go on forever, shimmering under fluorescent lights. Grey and white and red by the stockroom doors, stained by bloody footprints as another soulless stocker walks through the remnants of the void's last victim.

-“I need this specific item off of the top shelf, on the highest rack in the store,” the customers says to you. You are not tall enough to reach it on your own, but the tentacles certainly help.

-You have never been able to figure out why everybody calls the store by the wrong name. Can't the customers see that it says “hell” right above the front door in flickering red lights?

-The same song plays at the same time each day, a working reminder in a timeless space full of unmoving clocks that time still moves forward. Or does it just move back around in an infinite loop? The music playing over the speakers turns to static.

-“I need lye,” a frazzled woman asks you at 3am. She holds in her arms a box of garbage bags, rubber gloves, and cleaning supplies. You can see the blood splatter on her cheek.

-“I want to fill out an application,” a young, mousey girl asks, barely out of her teens. You want nothing more than to tell her to run, to turn around and never return, but you can feel the shadows slithering through your veins like crude oil, hungry and impatient. You hand her an application.

-“I'd like to make a return,” the man says as he approaches the service counter. Your smile is dead, soulless. “I'm sorry, sir,” you respond “But we don't make returns on souls.”

-“Do you work here?” You are on vacation, halfway across the country, stopped in the middle of the soup aisle by a soccer mom you can swear you've met before. “Of course you do. I need to know if this soup is included in the sale.” You are in your street clothes, in another store chain that does not exist in your hometown. This is the moment you realize that the essence of two centuries in retail has soaked into your bones, and you can never scrub it out. “I'm sorry, but it's only this other brand that's on sale,” you respond.

_{Thoughts: Working retail is An Experience (TM). The Regional Gothic trend from a few years back was one of my favourite things to come out of the internet over the last decade, and I know this isn't the only Retail Gothic post that exists out on the internet, but it's my experience, anc nobody knows the eldritch horrors in the hellmart backrooms better than I do.}