St. Marley’s

Take the second left on Cornwell Avenue, right where the river starts to cut into town, and you’ll find it. A flower shop, small and dainty like something plucked out of a county fair, topped with a large, plastic daffodil with a smiley face painted in maroon spray paint. Or, at least it looks like a flower shop, and sometimes the customers you see milling around inside — smelling lily buds, weighing between buying organic or chemical fertilizer — look like people. Maybe you’ll swear you smell some sort of perfume when you approach it, something that reminds you of when your mother bought you a bouquet of roses or when your father let you run out into the fields barefoot right when the flowers started to bloom, but, then it’ll fade away until you wonder whether it was ever there at all. It wasn’t, but no one would accost you for thinking otherwise.

Last month, it was a movie theater, one of those old-fashioned, one-screen venues that stunk of cheap oil and spilled soda. And the people who entered- the real ones- not the figures sitting behind counters, handing out popcorn buckets and ripping apart pink, paper tickets, never left. Maybe you heard about it on the news, how 20 people all went to an abandoned, burned-out strip mall on the far side of town and vanished. Maybe it never hit the front cover like the laundromat that people swore tried to pull them into the machines or the convenience store that was set on fire in the middle of the night. An arsonist, the journalist on page five said, though I’m sure the people locked inside of the refrigerators would say otherwise. Or maybe none of it was known by the public, because why would anyone find their way to a parking lot covered in ash and soot and deep gouges in the pavement that felt far too organic to be made by a car? Maybe they liked the faint smell of soap or the brightly lit sign with a maroon smiley face painted right in the center of it.

A month after the convenience store incident — St. Marley’s was its name, as was the laundromat and the movie theater and the pet store filled with rabid animals and the short-lived fast food joint that gave all real customers cholera — theories started to pop up online about the nature of the store. Forums dubbed it ‘Hell’s Pavement’ or ‘St. Murder’ depending on the source and blamed everything from aliens to the government to Russian spies for its existence. Stories from supposed survivors cropped up, even from incidents that were known to have been completely fatal, as did photographs of a parking lot lit with a gentle glow, not from the broken street lights that surrounded it, but from the clearly photoshopped movie theater sitting on it. The store didn’t care, however, what rumors existed about it, and its bright smile refused to dim.

By the time the convenience store morphed into St. Marley’s Theater, a film crew had arrived to document the store - some team who focused on haunted asylums, tables possessed by evil spirits and the like. They probably showed up expecting to catch the theater in the act, or better yet, find the burnt bones of the people trapped inside of it like fishing gold nuggets out of a river of parking lot grime. However, when they got there, all but the cameraman saw an empty parking lot filled with gnarled shadows coming from a few flickering street lights. When the footage was inevitably uploaded online, it only reignited the rumors. People realized that only 1/10 were able to see the store at any given moment, leading to more theories about genetic predilections and dystopian attempts to cull the population. Some more religious sectors of the forums called it an act by some deity to purge the unworthy. Those people were promptly banned for using unsavory language. I only visited those forums once or twice because why bother when I could look out my front door and see it just a few blocks away, wavering in the summer breeze like a mirage?

But, I’m sure you already knew that because why else would you ask me for a quote? And yes, I have seen several of its forms. Not all — I, unfortunately, missed out on the colorful, smiling clown on top of St. Marley’s Burgers — but enough to know to leave it alone. That’s the funny thing; if you read your little forums close enough, you’d realize that no local has ever died in one. The laundromat was enough to convince us to stay away. But, I’m sure if you take that second left, you’ll see more than a few people outside of the flower shop, not entering, but just watching it like moths fixated on a pretty light. I bet you know a few of them, maybe friends, maybe those you only know from a screen name. Maybe they’ve told themselves that they’d only watch and take pictures, maybe get a video of a figure inside holding an ornate pot, but they’ll enter eventually. They’ll want to know if it’s real because how could something so vivid, so nostalgic, be anything but real? It’s not, and maybe they’ll realize that after it’s too late.

You know, I bet I’m the first person who answered when you knocked on my door. Most of us know to keep people like you in the dark, not because it’ll dissuade you or keep you from coming to our town, but because that darkness will only make St. Marley’s shine brighter. We’ve always kept a bet on how it’ll strike next, how many will vanish, never to be seen again. I even won $20 for predicting the movie theater incident. So, I’ll ask you this, when you enter a flower shop hours, minutes, seconds from sheer disaster, will you pick organic or chemical fertilizer?

***

Sarah Licht is a poet and writer based in Titusville, Florida. In their spare time, Sarah enjoys exploring nature preserves, reading early science fiction, and entertaining their caffeine addiction. Their work has been published in The Grinnell Review and is forthcoming in Screen Door Review.