Ink Drift - July

Issue 12 - Fear
The Creep Factor
man in her nightmares looked into the window.
“What’s the matter?” Rachel asked. “You
look like you saw a ghost.”
He stood hunched over, dressed in a
long black coat, looking at the second shelf
in the window display.
“Tammy?”
He was a giant but not really. He just
appeared that way. His face and extremities
belonged to a man seven feet or taller. His
features all merged into the center of his
enormous face, leaving his jaw and forehead
a wasteland of acne craters. And his
eyes, they were two dots of sub-zero tourmalines.
Rachael turned around. “Ew, who’s
that?”
“I think he has a PO Box next door. He
scares me.”
“You’ve waited on him?”
“No.”
“Probably just a looky-loo. It’s the normal-looking
guys you have to watch out for.
Like the asshole that robbed me.”
The man left.
Rachel opened the door and looked back
at Tammy. “I keep thinking the next time
someone will kill me. Or you.”
Tammy gasped.
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
Was she really, Tammy wondered? Even
so, Rachel left a chemtrail of gloom behind.
Tammy went back to the counter.
She entered the fourth decade of her
life without husband or child. She attracted
men who used her, takers. It made her feel
needed, in control, but they always left anyway.
She wanted to change, but habits were
stubborn, and men wanted younger women.
She dreamed of romances like those in a
Nora Roberts novel. She wanted to love and
be loved with a passion that could heat Pluto,
someone to share in the distinctions of
life, to be swept up a switchback of foreplay
and countless orgasms.
She went online to meet guys, lowered
her standards to the bell curve, where all
she asked for was a man, under sixty, with
a full set of teeth and a decent income. Not
even the Internet helped.
She glanced at the large framed mirror—
impossible not to look at—that hung on
the back of the showcases at the end of the
counter. There was no other place to hang
it, and her customers needed to see their reflection
when buying a necklace or earrings.
Tammy was without glamour, in a most
glamorous town, lacked charisma in a city
brimming with alluring women, but she
did the best she could: added extensions
to her lank dark hair, wore contacts that
tinged her brown eyes green, ran five miles
three times a week at Balboa Park. And
she was short in a town where the average
woman could play professional basketball.
She might have a humdrum face, one that
no boyfriend ever lied about by telling her
she was beautiful, but she had compassion,
could discover the kernel of beauty inside
another no matter how hideous the person.
So it distressed her, made her feel like she
wasn’t trying hard enough to discover the
inner goodness of the man in the topcoat
who looked into her window and tracked
her in her dreams. He couldn’t help what he
looked like. She worried that she was turning
into a shallow, selfie type of woman.
Tammy passed the day with customers
and the occasional consignor who came in
to pick up their check or add jewellery and
knickknacks to a showcase.
It was a half-hour before closing. The
January twilight cast a chill as darkness descended.
The street lamps on Ventura Boulevard
illuminated empty sidewalks. A light
show of pink, blue and yellow neon flashed
from the Thai restaurant across the boule-
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