My Dark Box
by G Dan Hilliard

I saw Jade through a peephole drilled into my box.  She parted my room’s garbage bag curtains with one hand, peeked left and right, then stepped inside.

            She’d smeared black lipstick around her eyes and drawn a gash across her throat.  Syrupy fake blood dried to a chocolate crust ran from the gash to her bulbous right breast.

            My own breasts are a little skimpy, but I cupped one and imagined it to be hers.   

            I smirked in the dark inside my box.  She stepped through the fog deliberately, as if toeing for pitfalls.  Her tiny hands hovered around her waist, curled into claws. Something cold skittered in my belly.

            “Oh Krissy,” she said.  “Break time.” 

            Her eyes flicked across leering clowns painted on the walls and plastic eyeballs stuffed in a popcorn machine.  They settled on my box.  She stepped to the left and vanished from my peephole. 

            I threw the box lid open and roared.  Jade’s hands went from her waist to her shoulders, then fell to her hips.

            “Figures,” she said.  “It’s break time.”

            “I saw you jump,” I said.  The muscles in my jaw and neck felt hot.  Clear, coppery saliva flooded my tongue. 

            “It was just the noise,” she said.  “And the clowns.”

            “I’m the only one that likes this place,” I said. 

            “Don’t mind working alone?”  Every couple of words, Jade ran her tongue across her lips.  My eyes followed it the way a cat follows a bird. 

            “Don’t have a choice because we’re short this year,” I said.

            She scraped her bottom lip with her teeth. 

            “How’s the trophy room?” I said

 “Autumn and I stand on ladders behind the walls and stick our heads through frames.”

            “I know.”

            “One guy touched my hair to convince his girlfriend I wasn’t real,” she said.  “I made her piss herself.”

            I clicked my tongue.

            “It’s hard to get a good scare when you’re the only one in the room,” I said.  “I spend most of my time in that damn box just waiting.”

            “You bitch too much,” she said.  “All right, it’s definitely break time…I’m having a smoke.”

            She whirled, churning the fog clinging to the cement floor with her black tunic.  I tossed my sweat-slimy wig into the box and followed. 

            She smoked menthols, unfiltered.  The minty smoke tinged the surprisingly warm October air.  I rested a knee against her chubby right thigh and watched her smoke in the parking lot outside our neighborhood YMCA’s haunted house, a converted used-car dealership.

            “Where’s everyone at?”  she said.  “It’s the weekend before Halloween.” 

            “It’s Sunday,” I said.  “It was pretty crowded yesterday.”

            “Aw, Sean bugged the hell out of me to go bowling yesterday,” she said.  “I can’t seem to shake that guy.”

            “You trying?” 

            “He’s a shitbrick,” she said.  “If he wasn’t a sweetheart, too, I’d lose him.”

            “I don’t think you’d have to go too far to find someone else to be sweet to you.”

            “I know,” said Jade.  She considered each drag on her cigarette.  She studied its drooping ash tip, wet her lips and put the butt on the tip of her tongue to draw it inside.

            Our break ended a cigarette inch later, and I climbed back into my box.  The sweat in my wig had turned stale.  I choked on fog.

            Every two or three minutes customers came through my clown room, joined at the hips or hugging each other from behind to form a quivering, unassailable caterpillar.  I screamed and gobbled at each group’s center to wedge them apart.  More often than not they scattered.

I drove a kid with a blonde rat-tail and a red Richland jacket into the popcorn machine.  His girl clapped her hands over her eyes and put her forehead against a wall.  They both giggled as they rushed through the exit’s fluorescent clown teeth.  

            Later, an older woman pushed into the room alone with her hands stuffed into a frazzled wool frock.  Tiny eyes like onyx beads set in burlap peered out from her babushka. 

            I did my best, honestly.  I let my tongue wag as I shook my head and bayed right in her face.  Her coffee-colored lips pursed. 

            “Who thinks up this stuff?” she said.  I shrugged, and she waddled through the exit.  I slunk back to my box. 

            Ten minutes went by without customers.  Then twenty.  I didn’t care what time it was.  I hadn’t even brought a watch. 

I closed my eyes in the box, enjoying the chug-chug-wuff of the fog machine and the creaky mood music oozing from an overhead speaker. 

            The box lid opened with a slight creak and a minty stink mingled with the fog.  Jade crawled in and let the lid bang shut.  A tube of light from my peephole illuminated her right shoulder and a little of her gore-splashed throat. 

            “Hi,” I said.

            “I couldn’t take sitting here all night,” she said.

            “It’s not so bad,” I said.  “It’s usually not so crowded.”

            I saw her shoulder lurch forward, and I met her just beyond the light.  I kissed her plump bottom lip with my eyes closed and tasted pumpkin and spice lip gloss.

            “I do like Sean,” she said. 

            “I know.” 

            "I couldn't come out with this, either.  Mom would freak out -- I mean, freak the fuck out. But I’ll give you a call tomorrow,” she said, tugging a hank of my fake hair.

            I let three groups file past my box before I screamed again.  When she didn’t call the next day, I didn’t mind.  I closed my eyes, cupped my breast and thought of the taste of pumpkin and spice.

            That was enough.