Roommate Cryptid goes to IKEA, and I stay there.
Okay, so Roommate Cryptid got a new job recently (yay!), and consequently he decided to make some purchases he'd been putting off before the tariffs fuck everything over for fuck knows how long. Top of the list was some furniture, as the man 1) did not own a dresser and 2) has a habit of winning all the plushies at carnivals and then keeping the Pokémon ones and donating the rest. He needed some shelves before Mount Stuffy toppled over on him.
We live decently close to an IKEA, so we piled into RC's car and drove over. The original plan was "get the dresser, look at shelving options, leave", but RC got a little carried away and we walked out near closing time with:
A dresser
A shelving unit
An elevated base for the shelving unit
Some baskets for the shelves
A nightstand
Some of you may have divined where this is going.
The boxes wouldn't all fit. We put the back seats down. We played Box Tetris. We inquired about delivery options. We committed unholy acts of geometry. Finally, about 30 minutes after IKEA closed, as safety-vested employees rounded up carts in the dark and foreboding parking lot, we got all the boxes into the car.
Just not all the boxes AND two humans.
"No biggie," I said. "You only have to remove one box for me to fit. Drive home, drop off a box, and then come back for me."
RC, having been raised a good churchgoing lad with delusions of chivalry, was horrified at the idea of leaving a woman alone in a dark and vaguely Swedish parking lot. He tried to talk me into letting him call me an Uber. I laughed at him and reminded him that I had a book, the loading dock was well-lit, and I had waited around in worse places. The worst I expected to encounter was a rat with a meatball addiction.
So off he drove, and I sat tailor-fashion on top of a concrete bollard and pulled out my book.
It was, of course, a horror novel.
I used to get really ghastly nightmares as a child and avoid horror on the assumption that the genre would make it worse, but as it turned out once I got into the spooky anyway at age 40, the contents of horror novels do not figure in my nightmares. Reality is so much worse that I find horror slightly comforting.
So it took me a while to notice that the employees were giving my bollard a wide berth and sidelong glances. It took me longer to realize it was because said bollard had a middle-aged woman on it, reading a book whose cover featured a rabbit being slowly disassembled by mushrooms, and smiling happily to herself under a flickering fluorescent light.
Anyway, RC came back about 20 minutes later, and we hit a drive-through on the way home because we were starving. I've got to go back to IKEA for something tomorrow, though, so there's a distinct chance I'll scare the shit out of an employee by accident. I walk more quietly than I realize ...
