I hate my job. I guess most people do, especially if they work retail. If you work the kind of soul-crushing retail that I do, you know what it’s like. Entitled moms with bad haircuts, creepy old men with bad teeth hitting on you, people expecting (or demanding) that you do things completely outside your job description and pay grade.
“Can’t you just…” said one such difficult customer, holding up a frame she found on the shelf and looking at me in disbelief. She was shocked that I would dare to charge her to just put the graduation photo of her awkward-looking son into it.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said. “That’s a service we offer, but we would have to put you in the system and charge you for framing services. We’re very busy right now, so it would be unfair of me to let you jump ahead in line when other people are waiting on their pictures to get framed too. If you’d like, I could show you how the frame comes apart so you could do it yourself. It’s very easy.”
“Fine. Do that, then.” She placed the frame down on the counter, and gingerly clutched the photo of her son, watching me like a hawk as I showed her how to undo the clasps holding the backing on, pull the stock photo out-
She slid the photo in, and before I could even say anything she snatched the frame out of my hands.
“Was that so hard?” she hissed, as she turned and walked away. And no, it wasn’t, and getting rid of her was the goal anyways, and now she’s gone, so I felt okay about this.
As she approached the sales counter at the front of the store to pay for the frame, she turned to me again and scoffs.
“If you’re so busy, why did you have time to argue with me, anyways?”
I sighed and looked down at my paperwork again. I had eighty-three frames to produce that week, and there were four days left, and on an average day I can produce twelve, so according to corporate math I was doing alright and didn’t need to bring in extra hours.
I’m sure this all sounds familiar, if you work corporate retail.
All in all, despite the heavy workload and the strange, angry customers, it was generally pretty boring and repetitive. But after ugly-graduating-son lady, another customer approached the framing department counter. She was a little strange-looking, for several reasons. Is it weird, or even racist, to find someone’s racial features exotic? I know that’s considered rude and objectifying, but this woman was all kinds of exotic I couldn’t even place. She was asian, presumably, somehow, but “Asian” is a pretty broad category. The thing is, I wasn’t able to pin her down any further than that. She could have been Tibetan or Japanese or Indian or even Ukranian for all I could figure. She looked like all of those things, and none of them. I tried to put it out of my mind, feeling that obsessing this much over someone’s ethnicity was kind of… gross. Creepy. Problematic, I thought with a mental snicker.
“I need to get this fixed,” she said plainly, and out of nowhere produced this enormous box. It’s what we call a shadow-box. (Sorry, I’ve forgotten how much of this stuff is common knowledge because I’m surrounded by it all the time. So I’ll end up over-explaining. Bear with me). A shadow box is like an ordinary frame, but the space between the glass and the artwork has been expanded. It’s deep. The frame is usually about two inches deep, but they can get even deeper. This one had to be three inches deep. Shadow boxes are usually made to house objects, or artwork that requires special protection or has a three-dimensional component. I recently put a customer’s ornamental knife collection into a shadow box, and I thought it’d be the most interesting item I’d frame all month. Then there was this.
About forty inches by thirty inches, hiding the counter beneath it, was this gorgeous ornate silver shadow box frame housing an incredible, intricate sculptural artwork depicting a blue-skinned goddess with dozens of arms, standing on a dead body. Some of the arms held severed heads, some knives. She wore a necklace of skulls, a short wrapped skirt, and little else. The entire piece was created from spun glass, fragments of jade, mother-of-pearl, bits of metal and small gemstones, and other unidentifiable substances. She glistened and shone brilliantly in the anemic fluorescent lights.
I was mesmerized. I couldn’t wrap my head around what I was looking at. It looked simultaneously like it was made from invaluable materials, but also the cast-offs of ravens hunting shiny garbage. Was it the work of one patient amateur, or thrown together in an afternoon by an expert, or assembled piece by piece in a sweatshop? Like it’s owner, it couldn’t be pinned down.
“Is it Kali?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant and conversational, but my voice cracked and whispered.
“Yes. Do you think it can be repaired?”
“Of course,” I breathed, losing myself in the gut-wrenching beauty of the image. “I mean, we would- first I’d-” I caught myself, blinked, forced my eyes away. “Wait, where is the damage?”
She pointed at the bottom corner of the box, where a loose piece of mother-of-pearl lay by itself. Skimming the image, I quickly spotted where it had fallen from: it was supposed to be a seaside cliff in the background.
“Is that all?”
“Yes. Not a big complicated, right? You can fix it?”
Now, I want you to understand that I wasn’t swayed by a beautiful woman in distress, nor by professional pride. I’m not that kind of guy. I’m really not, trust me. And it’s strictly against policy to do repair work on a customer’s artwork: we only frame it. So it was to my surprise that my mouth opened and a “yes” fell out.
Writing up her order on the computer was an exercise in lying to a machine to make it do what you want, and I felt like I was watching it all happen in a dissociative fugue. I charged for assembly/disassembly and an object mount. We were supposed to be making all in-shop work six days because of our heavy volume, but I found myself telling her it would be ready tomorrow. I cursed quietly at myself in my head while smiling dreamily and taking her money.
I was acting like I’d fallen in love at first sight- not with the customer, but with Kali.
She signed for the work and walked out smiling gracefully, while I stood sweating bullets behind the counter with Kali in front of me.
I carried the box back into the framing shop behind the counter, grunting a little. How she’d hoisted it so easily, I couldn’t understand. I’m a big guy, and I work out, but this thing threatened to flatten me if it fell on me. I set it down carefully on the work table, heaved it over on its front, and examined the back. I had other work I should have tackled first, but I knew this would probably take me a while, and I had to have it ready by tomorrow. I cursed again and again under my breath, still unable to believe how foolish I was.
Under the tape and paper, the backing of the frame was held in place with dozens of tiny nails. We don’t use them anymore, but they’re typical in older frames and have to be removed carefully with needle-nose pliers.
Once the backing was free, I hugged the whole assembly in my arms and prayed under my breath as I turned it face-up again. I heard something rattle loose, probably the chunk of mother-of-pearl, and I felt a bead of sweat run down the side of my face.
I lifted the frame and glass away from the backing, and it came apart cleanly. There she was, exposed to the air for the first time in probably decades. Kali’s eyes seemed to catch my own, as though she knew what I was doing and was sizing up my worthiness. I put the frame aside, and took a minute to bask in her terrifying beauty.
I was raised Presbyterian, but not seriously, and have considered myself an agnostic since I was a teenager. But the religions of the world always fascinated me. I tried to dredge up some history about Kali from memory, but wasn’t sure about it. Wasn’t she the consort of Shiva? Wasn’t she fated to destroy the universe so that he could eventually remake it? I was fuzzy on the details, but knew that she was important and fearsome. This artwork captured that perfectly.
I put on some nylon gloves and carefully lifted the piece of landscape that had fallen loose. It all looked pretty simple. The background was painted wood. I just needed to dab some silicone glue to the background and set this part back in place, then let it dry overnight, and reassemble the frame in the morning. An easy client. I’d probably even still have time to do a few more orders before I left.
So that was what I did, and at first everything seemed to be going smoothly. I set the mother-of-pearl back in place, and stood back to have a good look.
It didn’t look right. It wasn’t in line with the horizon, making it look like the water level was off-kilter. I reached forward to turn it just a few degrees, steadying myself with the other hand-
How I fucked this up so severely, I’ll never understand. I thought I was putting my left hand down on a piece of bare background, but I was wrong. I put my left index finger down on Kali’s knee, and instantly I heard a snap.
I swore, and felt my eyes tear up, but I knew I couldn’t stop what I was doing or things would just get worse. I finished adjusting the mother-of-pearl island, blinking away tears, and saw that it looked perfect now. Then I looked over to see what I had broken.
The blue glass of Kali’s leg had broken- fairly cleanly, actually, but it would never look the same. I lifted it slowly, holding my breath, to get a better look.
I could fix this, I thought to myself. The crack would be visible, and I would need to explain to the customer, and probably give her a refund, but as long as I fixed it and gave it back in one piece, maybe she wouldn’t sue.
We don’t do repairs, because we have no insurance for it.
Very slowly and deliberately, I returned the shard of blue glass back to the leg, to see how it would attach. Somehow, on the way back, my left thumb brushed against the delicate metal of her skirt, and I felt something come loose. I stopped breathing again, feeling like I would probably scream if I opened my mouth.
I looked closer to see that the metal piece I had knocked loose was actually a severed arm. Her skirt was made of them, to match her necklace of severed heads. In my imagination it was Kali herself warning me that I would loose my own arm if I wasn’t more careful.
I stopped, stood back, and thought it through. I needed to plan this out, and the tools in the shop wouldn’t cut it. I went into the store proper- we’re an art supply store, so we carry the things I would need. I bought a pair of rubber-tipped tweezers and a tube of superglue, paying out of my own pocket out of guilt.
I went back into the shop and went about fixing the mistakes I’d made. I applied the superglue carefully to the blue glass and held it in place with the tweezers, and once it was set the crack was barely noticeable. I breathed a sigh of relief, and went about repairing the arm.
As you can probably guess at this point, things didn’t go well. It looked like it was going to be okay, but I was so tense and nervous that my arm slipped and my right wrist fell down right on to Kali’s face.
I don’t cry much; before this night I think I probably hadn’t cried in years, since my mother passed away. But the tension was so high and my unexpected attachment to this artwork so sudden, that I couldn’t hold back. I let out a guttural yell and just started bawling openly, still so concerned with the artwork that I averted my face to the side to avoid any tears landing on it and wrecking it even further.
Janice, the cashier on til, came into the back to see what was going on. She found me there with this broken goddess in front of me, crying like a little kid, and wasn’t sure what to say.
“Are you alright?” she asked, sounding stunned.
“No,” I replied, shaking my head and wiping back tears.
“Anything I can do?”
“No. This is just… I mean, I’ll do what I can, but I think I’m in big trouble. Marion is going to kill me. Then fire me. Then probably kill me again.” I laughed weakly.
She awkwardly put a hand on my shoulder and tried to comfort me, which worked a little.
“Thank you. I’m going to try and… fix this, I guess.”
“Okay. Let me know if you need anything.”
Piecing the face back together is a bit of a blur- I remember it turned out better than I expected, but my expectations were very low to start with. It didn’t look great. Once it was done I didn’t even want to look at it.
After my shift, I bought a two-four of beer, settled on my couch, and drank until I didn’t remember drinking. My phone had just enough juice to wake me the next morning.
My morning routine included vomiting, drinking two gatorade, coffee at the drive-through, crying again in the parking lot outside work, and sulking towards the framing counter like I was heading towards my execution and couldn’t believe that my own two legs were taking me there.
I had barely finished re-assembling the damaged artwork when I heard the counter bell behind me. I turned around to see her standing there, and I swallowed hard.
I can’t tell you exactly what I said. It was a rambling, apologetic, pathetic mess of words. She just stood there, unsurprised, unreacting. I said something about how sorry I was, how we usually don’t do repairs, how I would give her a full refund, and like an idiot I practically begged her not to take us to court.
Her stoic, dark-eyed expression didn’t change.
“May I see it, please?” she asked calmly.
I picked it up off the work table and brought it to her, setting it down gently on the counter.
“I- the damage was-” I gestured feebly at the face, the knee. It was obvious where the damage was.
Her expression finally changed, just very slightly. I could tell from my own mother, that look of restrained disappointment. She kept trying to look me in the eyes, but I couldn’t bring myself to look back. She put her hands on the sides of the frame.
“I’ll give you a full refund,” I stammered again.
“That won’t be necessary.”
“At the very least, let me wrap it up for you-”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“I’m so- so sorry-” I felt tears coming to my eyes again.
“That won’t be necessary either.”
Finally I looked her in the eyes. There was so much anger and disapproval in those eyes, but also underneath it all a kind of pity. I felt like I was looking into Kali’s own eyes.
“Your karma will be brought back into balance. I’m not worried. You will repay what you have done, and all will be forgiven. After the price is taken out of your soul.”
A long, deep breath passed as we looked at each other. I didn’t understand what was happening.
“Are you going to take us to court?” I asked naively.
She just shook her head, picked up the box, and walked out with it as though it weighed no more than a sheet of paper.
It was after that day that the cursed images started coming.
Submitted November 03, 2019 at 06:17AM by OneFaraday https://ift.tt/34k4sPE
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