Have you ever experienced being in public and some creep or crack person noticed you and started grinning at you? I want you to think about and remember how did that make you feel.
“What is the color of the walls?” he asked in his deep rumbling thunder voice, the pace of which was lowering and the volume softening. His voice was the only familiar thing I had at that moment. “White, the same boring apartment white that all the American apartment complexes have,” I replied as I felt my words getting slightly more stretched out and my voice becoming dry. My eyes started to feel heavier and for a short moment, my head dipped as my awareness shut. I woke up with a jolt a second later.
“Babe, I’m starting to get really sleepy. I think I’ll get some rest and call you tomorrow” I said trying to sit up so that I didn’t fall asleep again. “Wow! You aren’t the only one feeling sleepy you know. It is late at night and I’m feeling tired too. But I’m here putting in an effort trying to talk to you.” He replied from the other end. I felt my irritation rise as I thought to myself ‘I should have known this is how it would be regardless of the distance between us.’ This man knew I had just traveled for sixteen hours. “Listen, I don’t have the energy for this right now. This is unreasonable and I really need to sleep,” I said. “Fine, I’m a dumbass, of course, trying to stay awake for you and talking to you.” There was a moment of silence after his words and then I cut the call. We had promised each other we would try to be better. A promise we made after every argument we had.
I stared at the small room I was in. It looked empty in the spaces that should be full and cluttered in the areas that should have been empty. The floor was full of brown cardboard boxes and luggage. One of which was open, I had taken out the bed covers from it. The bed was the only thing set up in the empty room. The shelves and the single table as well as the small closet remained open and empty. I just wanted to sink into the bed and lose myself in the arms of deep slumber for the next few hours. Then I had a sudden pang hit me in my stomach.
A few seconds later there was another stomach call, ‘Ughh, hunger pangs’ I realized. I ignored it and curled up in bed hoping to sleep off and eat something the next day. Five minutes passed, then fifteen, twenty minutes passed with me lying in the same position but sleep was nowhere close. I don’t know if it was his words affecting my mood or the hours of traveling but my body did a 180 on me and now I was hungry, thirsty, and unable to sleep.
I sat up in bed. An uneasy feeling ran through my body. My thirst made it seem like my throat was a dry well. A hot desert where camels walked with cracked feet from the lack of moisture. ‘Unbalanced’, that is what my body and mind felt like. Then a sudden thought entered my head. It was an image, flashing in my eyes. A logo bright red in color with yellow bulbs around it, most definitely a Vegas club design rip-off, ‘Hi-Day – The 24-hour supermarket’.
I saw the sign when I was moving here. It was a grocery store at a very close walkable distance from my new apartment. I took a look at my phone, ’12:30 AM’. ‘It is kinda late. Actually, is it? It is a college town, who sleeps that early? And my roommates haven’t yet arrived, it’s not like I’m disturbing anyone,’ I thought, ‘But I don’t have a car and I don’t know shit about this place. Walking out in an unfamiliar this late could be a bad idea’. As I debated in my head whether or not I should head out, my stomach made a loud sound. I looked down at my stomach, ‘fuck it’ I thought and got up from my bed.
Wearing the first thing I found in my luggage bag, and a small white purse that I crossed on my shoulder, I stepped out. The streetlights dimly lit the road that was surrounded by forest space. In less than ten minutes I saw the lit-up board and big building. ‘Hi-Day, here I come’, I thought. Walking towards the building I realized there weren’t many cars in the parking lot, three or four cars max. I didn’t see anyone outside and I hurried into the building. Right before I entered the automatic doors, I had a sudden feeling of being watched and had the urge to look to my right. I saw someone on my right crouched down behind a bin. The person was wearing a black hoodie and dark green shorts. There wasn’t any light near the area so I couldn’t see the person’s face, however, I am positive the person slowly raised their head and saw me looking at them. It was a one-second moment but it instantly changed the pace of my heartbeat.
I ran inside the store. The air was chilled inside. The cold made the dryness in my throat feel worse and I felt the hair on my arms and back raise as a light shiver ran down my spine. The white walls inside seemed large and never-ending. The shelves seemed a little too perfect with their sharp alignment and clean colors. Something felt off about the store, ‘majorly off’ I remember thinking to myself. ‘This was a bad idea, I should have stayed home.’ I looked around and there seemed to be a good amount of people in the store.
When I looked at the different lanes and shelves, they seemed long and made me feel dizzy. The shelves seemed a little too tall, the carts too big and I felt like a small-sized doll in a playhouse too big for its size. ‘Was everything this big when I entered?’ if it had been, I hadn’t realized it before. I could feel my stomach dip and I started to feel lightheaded. ‘Let me just take what I want quickly since I am here, check out, and go back asap.’ I looked up at the signs indicating which items were in which aisles. The signs too seemed large, giving me billboard vibes. It was like a whole different city/ world inside the supermarket, a world where I didn’t belong. I couldn’t get the man outside the store out of my head. In the time it took me to get my cart closer to where the aisles began, I decided I would Uber my way back home. There was no way I was walking back home.
I rushed to find the drinks or food section and every step was giving me a headache. An old lady passed by me with her shopping cart. Slightly bent and wearing a pastel blue blouse with a long white skirt, she had cotton fluff white hair which felt like it was dumped on her head as an afterthought. Her zoned-out face seemed lost in the distance when she suddenly looked at me as our carts came too close. The wrinkly skin on her hanging cheeks stretched out as she smiled the most exaggerated psychotic smile I’d ever seen. My heart and stomach dipped and I felt like like a child left alone with unknown scary adults who are terrifying but seem completely normal from the outside.
I froze for a couple of seconds as I stared at the woman. I could think of nothing and I felt pure chilling fear. When I remember her face, it still makes me want to piss my pants. I collected myself trying my best to not scream and moved my cart aside and rushed further. Rushing inside in a random direction I quickly passed another shopper. A man who must have been in his late thirties, wearing a yellow T-shirt and black shorts with the same expressionless look. That is until our carts came closer and his eyes met mine in an unnatural quick movement of the neck. The corner of his lips turned upwards and his lips extended into a big terrifying smile. I let out a short gasp and I started to feel like I was losing more of my balance. But I still managed to somehow move my cart along and started moving faster than is okay in a supermarket.
As I rushed and started passing the other shoppers, I realized everyone had a weird expression on their faces. A blank poker abnormally plain face that would turn into a sinister soulless smile as soon as I had eye contact with them. My feet refused to stop. I abandoned my cart and I started to run like a lunatic trying to find a place that was free of people. The more I ran the bigger the place seemed to get and it felt like the number of people just kept increasing. Those smiles were making me want to throw up.
My heart was beating so fast, I felt like it would burst. I was running around the store like a mad woman. Tears started streaming down my cheeks as people continued to do the sudden neck turn and smile at me. My head started pounding as loud as my heart and my breath started to get quicker. I started struggling to breathe. I ran to an aisle and faced the products placed on the shelf, refusing to look at anything else apart from the big cereal boxes in front of me. The bright yellow perfect rectangle box directly in front of me was as repelling as everything else in the store. However, it was better than looking at any alternatives. I looked down at my shoes and took a couple of deep breaths trying to bring back my breathing to function and my heart to slow down. I could hear shopping carts moving behind me.
I slowly tried to collect myself and opened my bag to pull my phone out. The first thing I saw was the battery sign which said ‘2%’. Having lost all sense of adult thinking, like a scared child, I went to the only familiar place I knew. My fingers opened the contacts app on my phone and tapped on my boyfriend’s number. I could hear the dial tone starting to ring. My eyes became blurry from tears filling up my eyes. ‘Sorry, the caller you are trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please try again later.’ The ring went all the way through but he did not pick up the phone. I wiped my tears away. With shaky fingers, I dialed the number one more time.
After three rings the call was cut and a second later a text popped on my phone. ‘Don’t talk to me.’ He was still mad from our previous phone conversation and I knew he wouldn’t pick up the phone at that moment. I sobbed uncontrollably and my fingers quickly exited the contacts app and swiped the screen till I reached an online cab app. I opened the app and put my location in, then typed in the location of my new house as the destination address. The app screen confirmed that my driver was 5 minutes away. I was reading the last four digits of the cab’s number plate when my phone went blank. My phone had died. This was extremely scary for me, but something else happened that made it seem like a joke in comparison.
The sounds of the carts moving stopped as suddenly and abruptly as the dying of my phone. I gathered all my courage to peek behind my feet. I saw the bottom of a cart facing me and a little to the left was a pair of feet with spick and shiny black formal men’s shoes with another set of wheels belonging to a shopping cart.
Even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t have looked behind me or at anyone in any direction. I had zero courage to do that. I dropped to the floor like a toddler. Looking at nothing aside from the floor, and the wheels and feet on that floor, I started to move.
‘The cab is still going to be here,’ I told myself and crawled, dragging myself towards the path I could remember being the correct direction. I kept moving for what felt like an eternity as my tears dropped to the floor. The place was populated with still carts and feet, they were unnaturally still, just like statues. Hours passed, or at least it felt like hours passed, I had no way to tell, I kept dragging my body forward. Finally, I came to a space where the flooring felt different. I recognized it as the area from which I originally picked up the cart. That meant I was close to a point of exit.
Soon, I reached that automatic door I had come in from. I moved to the exit and crawled out of the building. After what felt like hours, I finally moved my sore neck up and saw a single car waiting on the road. The black shine was lit up from the front lights of the vehicle. It was easy to spot the car on the road connected to the almost empty parking area with the same two-three cars parked as the ones I saw earlier when going in. The number plate matched that of the cab I had seen on my phone.
Something urged me to look to my left and I saw the crouched man earlier still crouched down. He looked at me, and with speed, he got up screamed out loud with all of the air in his lungs. Equally fast, he ran towards me. That was all the adrenaline I needed to get up and run for my life. The man continued to scream as he ran behind me, closing the distance between us. My feet hit the dark concrete road with me running to the cab and I quickly entered shutting the door behind me, locking it. The driver seemed unfazed by the man outside banging on my window and screaming because he said my name, confirming if I was the one who booked the cab. I replied in the affirmative and he started the cab.
I asked the driver if he had a charging cable that would fit my phone type and fortunately, he had one that was the right match. The driver had to take a different route back to my house. When he told me that, I looked at the GPS navigation screen in front of him without looking at his face, confirming that it was, in fact, a route to my apartment. Apparently, a fallen tree blocked the road I came from. I agreed to be taken home from whichever route he could take me.
I have my phone charged a good amount now and I am almost home. I wrote all of this down and shared it here, in order to process what happened to me. We’ve just entered the apartment complex where my apartment is and the driver is headed towards my building. The ride back home was mostly silent and the dark stagnant forest ambiance just add to the petrifying experience that has hopefully ended. I just want to get home and lock myself inside. The only thing is, I am scared, I am scared that when I get down I might have to look at the face of the cab driver. I have a feeling, a feeling that I cannot explain, a feeling that tells me that if I look at the driver, he will have a massive anomalous smile on his face.