I do not have puppet cancer!

And then I need to figure out how they realize it's a haunting but probably Robin figures it out. But at some point Eddie types his name into the computer or pulls up his rental file so they know who the ghost is. And he doesn't actually remember what happened after Billy told him to hold still. It'll be over soon. He sort of remembers it not being over soon enough. He doesn't actually want to remember more than that.

And Steve decides he's going to help Eddie with his unfinished business so Eddie will go to the afterlife and stop annoying him. And Eddie makes up some wild goose chase unfinished business to fuck with him. Maybe there's a thing where Steve has to carry around one of the VHS tapes so Eddie can leave the store. And they're spending a lot of time together on this wild goose chase and Eddie is starting to kind of get a soft spot for the guy.

And then I think it's a thing where after the fake out the party tries to legit help Eddie move on and whatever they do fails and the rest of the party is like this sucks. What else can we try? But Steve is secretly relieved that Eddie's sticking around and Eddie doesn't seem that disappointed either. And keeps sticking around. And sticking around.

And maybe the longer they spend together the more Eddie becomes visible to Steve and it could be a thing where Steve can see and hear him but just can't touch him or can only touch him when he's sporadically corporeal.

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

“What… did you do?”

“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”

And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.

common origins of suffering, euphoria, and ferret

~ Florence Harrison, table of contents illustrations for Christina Rossetti: Poems (1910)