Garden centres are the epitome of liminal space and not just the roadside ones, the town-based centres are just as dimensionally challenged as their motorway counterparts. Even their pop-up kiosks carry the same air of untraceable worry that there is something impossible spying on you from some tall shelf full of strangely organic looking ceramic pots.
Where possible, avoid roadside garden centres near closing time and especially in the winter when sunlit hours are pitifully few. All those little scuttering sounds coming from underneath the raised flower displays and the shifting bags of dirt that could so easily hide a body, all those tiny eyes and impossible jaws you see between the roses as you double and triple-take, all of them rise with the growing shadows.
Town centres seem to contain lesser versions of their larger sibling stores' inhabitants. Though lesser in stature they are no less deadly than their counterparts and far more adept at distracting humans to minimise their presence. It's so much easier to catch a child when their parents are otherwise occupied talking to a random member of staff whose pupils occasionally flicker and whose teeth change size slightly.
All it takes is a moment of your time, the mildest lapse in concentration and they have you. Hours later you'll realise you've been wandering the store alone, no matter who you arrived with and you now push a trolley full of sniggering bags of compost that will no doubt lead to a dozen or so squirrelcorpses being left at your back door in gratitude for freeing them.
No comments:
Post a Comment