By Tristian Martin
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It was a humid summer evening in my town on the East Coast. Being a thirty-year-old man, I would have thought that nothing would ever surprise me. However, I find myself currently hiding inside my own storage unit, trying to piece together the events that occurred earlier in the night.
For context, about three weeks before tonight, I had just begun dating again. I matched with someone really interesting on a dating app. Her name was Sadie, she was in her mid-thirties, tall, and had dark hair. After two dates, I could pick up that she was a very confident woman who had similar interests in nature. She discussed with a seductive bite of her bottom lip that she had her own pretty well-known gardening shop in town. I was enthralled by learning about this part of her personality, given that I was a huge biology nerd.
Anyway, a day or two after that date, I thought that I'd go do something quite nice for her after my morning shift at work. I clocked out and bought her a small stuffed bear to surprise her with at her business. I pulled up and parked my car on the side of the road and crossed the street over to her gardening shop. I was impressed with how it looked from the outside. I came close to the store window and peered inside. I could barely see through the leafy foliage, but she was grabbing some soil bags for a customer, an older gentleman in a fedora.
She looked busy, so I figured I'd come back later in the day. I went home, changed my clothes, and warmed up some food. The sun was slowly starting to go down overhead, and quickly I grabbed the stuffed bear and got in my car. Pulling up to her store, I noticed that the lights were dimmed, and I hoped she wasn't closed for the night. I walked across the street again and peered through the window, except this time I could barely see even less inside than before. Worried, I tried the door, it pulled open, and the sound of a bell rang loudly through the shop.
Upon my loud entrance, I was met with only silence as nobody came to greet me. In the far corner of the store, sprinklers suddenly kicked on to water large potted ferns. As I took in my surroundings, I saw to my left that there was an adjacent room with what looked like large metal sinks cast in a flickering red light. I walked timidly across the squeaky wooden floorboards to that room. As I stepped into the room, I was met with a disgustingly strong odor, which I could only assume to be fertilizer. However, there was something else that dominated even that smell, almost like decomp.
Confused in the shadows of flickering red light, I stepped on something odd. Bending down, I grabbed a familiar-looking fedora. I froze as I heard the distressed moan from directly above the sinks. Looking upward from my perspective, there hung plastered to the wall the upper half of the older gentleman from earlier. He was wrapped up in dark twisted vines that convulsed and slithered around him as his organs dropped out from his torso, which filled the sinks below. In shock, I dropped the fedora and the bear from my hands to cover my mouth. As tears trickled down my cheeks, I had begun to step backwards cautiously from the gruesome scene before me. I lost balance tripping over a watering can that was underfoot, falling to the floor with a thud.
The sound of my clumsiness echoed and reverberated throughout the store. Directly in front of me, from inside the large metal sink came the sudden but slightly recognizable voice of my date, Sadie, with a strange warbled tone.
“Who is there?” She had snarled, her head and hair cresting over the edge of the sink. Sadie's eyes, now glossy and jet black, meet mine in the red lightning. “Ah, hello, lover, don't you look tasty,” she exclaimed wickedly, raising to reveal her gnarled mouth, which was lined with two rows of long spiky protrusions dripping in blood resembling that of a Venus fly trap plant.
Panicked, I stammered quickly upwards onto my feet and ran as hard as I could towards the front door of the shop. Sadie angrily yelled, “You will all become my fertilizer!” as I had ripped that front door open and bolted across the street into my car. Looking back at the storefront as I drove off, she stood at the window abnormally and was creepily waving goodbye. Terrified and worried for my own safety, I had to find a spot in town for the night that had to be safe and secure. I just hope that Sadie won't find me amongst the clutter. Let's just hope that in the morning I can call the authorities and forget about this night.
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