okay okay so a little under a year ago now I was craving a sandwich. I went to my normal downtown subway, but it turned out it was buy one get one free day so it was crowded. after some thought, I remembered that there was another subway almost exactly across the street. same franchise, different location, very close to the one I go to and yet I’d never been. I decide to go see if it’s as swamped as my normal one.
I walk in and it’s as good as dead. there’s two people in line in front of me, four people behind the counter, and two employees wandering the store. it’s gorgeous. clean as anything. a fireplace with a burning fire (nice as it’s the dead of winter in pennsylvania at this point), and smooth jazz playing softly on the speakers. it’s huge. there are armchairs. the windows have curtains and a lovely view of downtown. it’s immediately the kind of place you could stay forever but I have a bus to catch in like half an hour so I walk up and get in line.
as I do, I see the first two behind the counter employees. one looks dead. one looks angry. the dead one… and I call her this because she literally looks zombified. not normal min wage worker dead but like her brain was removed dead… asks what she can get for me and I place my normal order. it begins to go down the line. it gets to the second person, the angry one, who says with the most INTENSE STARE to Dead Eyed Girl, “if we all had to come in and we don’t get busy, I’m burning down the city.”
Dead Eyed Girl, eyes still dead, says “Except for this store, of course.”
“Of course not, we can’t burn down this store.”
Dead Eyed Girl literally echoes “We can’t burn down this store.”
this is when I start to go from curious to a little freaked out. angry one takes my subs out of the toaster and begins to put veggies on it, then shoves it over to the person at the register who is, according to the logs I looked up to make sure I remember this accurately, remarkable for one reason… I was paying attention to EVERYTHING and yet I can’t remember what they looked like at all. I pay and I get my sandwiches and my drink cup and go to fill my drink up.
standing near the drink machine at this point are two more terrified looking employees who are talking quietly to themselves. I fill my cup up with sprite and am about to put a lid on it when one says “oh. that machine… doesn’t work.” note: at this point I have the drink already and it looks and smells right. “here, let me go replace that for you. don’t drink that! one second!”
he looks TERRIFIED as he goes to the cooler and pulls out three bottles of sprite and looks TERRIFIED as he holds them out to me asking, terrified, “here, is that enough?”
and so I just “yeah… thank you?” as he takes my cup and gives me the bottles. it’s more sprite than I paid for.
I sit down as far from the counter as I can and begin to eat. my first toasted sandwich? cold. according to my phone I’ve been in here for five minutes only. I didn’t see the customers who were in here when I entered leave. nobody else has come in. I’d planned to get out my laptop and wait here out of the cold for the bus, but even as I eat the sandwich time seems slow so I just devour it and leave. it’s not even been ten minutes since I came in. just take my second (cold) sandwich and my bottles of sprite and book it.
and I ask around about this subway. everyone I know says it’s perfectly normal and they’ve been there several times and it’s fine! and sure enough when I work up the courage to go back in two weeks later, the fireplace is not operational (in fact it’s blocked off), the music is staticky and pop, there’s no armchairs, and it’s not very clean at all. is there a possibility they cleaned it up for the event and redecorated in two weeks? yes. is it more likely that I wandered into the fey realm for a bit? perhaps.
I didn’t drink the sprite I didn’t pay for.
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