Leah: Just the Average Morning

Again, I love Michigan weather.

The rain started early this morning on my way into the gallery. Four hours later, it was still going, not really hard, but the drops were big and sloppy, coating the words, “McArthur’s Art” painted on the double picture window at the front of the gallery. Today was going to prove to me that it was a bad time to quit smoking.

I had finished the store opening sequence: Unlock the doors, start the coffee pot, and flip the open sign around. The door opened fine, though the light in the back room popped out when I flipped it on. I had to start the coffee in the dark, which isn’t as hard as it sounds. The signs flipped easily, and the cash register actually did was it was supposed to do at the start of another day at work. By the time I had logged into my various work related, and not work related websites, I decided that fixing the light was going to have to wait because getting a stool and finding another bulb was just too much effort for a rainy morning. I got my coffee in the dark.

After sipping the first smooth cup of coffee I started with the usual time waster of checking my email and proceeding to the rest of the internet within twenty minutes after deleting my inbox of spam. It wasn’t all spam, there were some updates that I had voluntarily subscribed to from various websites that I would usually end up visiting in my daily routine anyways after deleting the emails. That was about three hours ago. Mornings were usually slow, the gallery didn’t really pick up until late afternoon, and that was just the art students trying to work up the nerve to get shot down on their proposal to showcase their art at the gallery.

My father, big-daddy McArthur was very picky about what kind of art was shown at the gallery. Not that you could blame him, his name was on the door. We specialized in artifacts more than art. Ancient arrowheads from the Byzantine Empire and the Romans were in glass cases near the front of the gallery. Coins from sunken Spanish galleons were in another case near-by. My father, in one of his few attempts to keep up with the times, had bought the coins to capture the popularity of pirates. At the back of the gallery we had various replicas of weapons. Five different interations of the legendary Excalibur were hung on the walls, near a cabinet that held battle worthy daggers and katana’s, small price tags attached to each one. The katana’s, unlike the coins were not there to cater to the popularity of ninjas.

The art we showcased took up the rest of the wall reality. The paintings created pockets of fantasy worlds with landscapes of lush, green forests surrounding impossibly huge castles and scenes of war between storybook races of elves and orcs. The art was mostly for sale, though there were no price tags attached. The paintings came from a very specific group of local, and not so local artists.

Suddenly, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end when I heard the door in the back open.

I heard the floor in the back room creak and groan as I tried to look through the tiny window in the door above the “Employees Only” sign on the door to the back room. A dark shadow moved behind the glass. I stepped forward with hesitating steps, wondering who would be coming in my back door. Peaking through the window, I watched an 8 foot tall beast shrug his way through the door frame. Rain flowed down a dirty trench-coat, through shaggy brown and black fur covering platter sized hands. It stepped forward and the wooden floor moaned in protest, and something wooden cracked.

I breathed in deeply, steadying my nerves and pushed through the door into the black, back room.

“What’d you do?” I asked stalking into the room.

“You need a new coat-rack,” growled the beast through something more like the snout of a dog rather than a round mouth. It even had the pearly, white fangs to match. My cheap wooden coat-rack, which was proving its discount cost as it lay in pieces on the floor. The beast leaned over and pointed at the pieces of wood with black talons.

“You can’t go anywhere without breaking something, can you?”

“I was trying to turn the light on,” said the beast, slipping out of his massive leather coat and nodding to the floor where my broken coat rack was, “You know this light doesn’t work right?”

I leaned down and began picking up the broken pieces of the coat rack, “Yup, it was on my list of stuff to do,” I said, stepping over taking the giants coat and hanging the sopping mass on a coat rack by the door. The smell of wet dog assaulted my nose and I had to breathe from my mouth to stop from gagging. Imagine an 8 foot tall, 400 pound dog, still dripping wet, and you realize that smell is proportional to size. “So, what’s up Brutus?”