[Dark Humour]

Edison awoke to a cluster of iron stalactites hanging over the length of his body. Instead of feeling alarm, he felt a vague disappointment and an intrusive yearning for one of the spikes above to pierce him straight through the heart.

'Great,' he thought dully. 'Time to get back to work.'

Sighing heavily, Edison hauled himself up from the dusty floor that he used as a bed for his daily mid-afternoon naps. It was time to resume his duties as the underachieving, part-time working high school dropout he had always aspired to be. He crept out of his hiding place behind one of the display cases near the back of the overcrowded shop, rubbing sleep and customary teenage ennui from his eyes.

Above him, the iron lamps clunked against one another as a strong breeze charged through the storefront and bounced off the back of the tiny space, rocking even the heaviest of the lot. A few of the paintings that hung on the wall swayed on their rusted hooks. Edison didn't bat an eye. For the past three years, he had been the sole person manning the shop for Mr. Fanqi, the owner, who apparently liked to spend his time gambling away all the store's earnings—including, Edison surmised, a large percent of the wages Fanqi was supposed to be paying him.

In three years, Edison had never been given a raise, but not for his lack of trying. He never truly tried at his job, it was true, but Edison preferred to blame this career standstill on his cantankerous Chinese boss and his double-jeopardy addiction to baijiu and pai gow. The two always went hand in hand: the money flew out of his hands as the booze flowed down his throat. Perhaps his dulled, drunken senses mitigated his sense of loss at every misplayed poker hand, at every thousand lost from his bank account.

Fanqi’s shop definitely wasn’t a lucrative endeavor: it was only open from noon till six on weekdays and, despite repeated encouragement from surrounding shop owners, Fanqi never participated in the bazaars that opened up in the square across the street every night—the time when people actually came out to spend money on the useless old junk (or “antiques” when he could muster the audacity) that filled his shop. Fanqi, it seemed, had a business sense that could rival his employee’s work ethic.

Stretching generously, Edison’s gangly limbs spanned almost the entire width of the rundown shop. As he brought his hand back to cover his yawning mouth, he knocked over a hollow wooden doll that stood on the display case. The doll was one of an army of other wooden soldiers—just as ugly as and sallow as Fanqi himself. The entire shop, in fact, was crammed full of ugliness: chinaware that looked like it had been hand-painted by the blind and arthritic, water-stained mirrors that turned people into living jigsaw puzzles… And the faces. All the grotesque faces.

There were gloomy portraits of pock-marked faces; wooden dolls with bulbous heads and tiny faces; eyeless masks with chipped and stony faces. From every corner of the shop, Edison was being ogled and leered at by inanimate objects whose makers tried hard and failed harder at making them look appealing.

[TBC]