Cauldron
It typically took new employees at Super Mega Holiday Supplies a week to work out how the store really made money. The owner, Reginald Watts, was a stingy man and his store occupied the corner lot of a failing strip mall, a combination that led to slow business and high staff turnover.
The store’s inventory followed the festive calendar; pumpkins and turkey-shaped oven mitts for Thanksgiving, blow up Santas and stunted conifers for Christmas, roses and edible lingerie for Valentine’s Day.
In between holidays, Super Mega Holiday Supplies sold scented candles, cards, animal balloons, wrapping paper, and cheap wigs, all of which was a cover for the illegal fireworks and bootleg cigarettes Reginald Watts personally loaded into trucks that idled in the bay behind the store.
Despite being in the business of performative joy, Mr. Watts was a joyless man, his only concession to festive cheer involved a giant cauldron that sat at the center of the store. He dressed the cauldron according to the season. At Easter, it became Calvary Hill, green with fake grass and topped with a crucified Jesus. For Halloween, it overflowed with cobwebs and animal skulls and cracked headstones. On Black Friday, it was stripped naked. Etc.
Unlike most everything else, Mr. Watts treated the giant hunk of cast iron with great respect, as though he believed it auspicious for business. Not touching the cauldron was essentially the first and last instruction of staff training, a command that became an excruciating temptation for many. For those that gave in, one touch was never enough, soon they’d be head-deep in the cauldron’s belly where they’d find a slip of paper that read “turn around, you fool”. When they returned to the bright white light of Super Mega Holiday Supplies, Mr. Watts would be stood behind them, holding their bag and pointing towards the door.
For a time at least, it seemed the cauldron really was auspicious. Years passed, years demarcated by holidays, holidays that Super Mega Holiday Supplies held on its shelves and the cauldron wore on its body, a body that made Mr. Watts rich and shrouded his business dealings in a cloud of secrecy, a cloud of secrecy that extended to Mr. Watts’ death, a death discovered by an employee who opened up the store one morning and found his corpse slumped against the cauldron.
The employee was not tempted to touch the cauldron. The employee called the police who cordoned off the strip mall and failed to find a speck of instructive evidence, but did uncover a backroom stuffed with boxes of fake watches and real champagne. The police called Mr. Watts’ family and Mr. Watts’ family called a removal company and the removal company sent a team which carted off the store’s inventory and tossed the cauldron to the curb as trash.
