The donation

"Attention Goodwill shoppers, just a friendly reminder that the store will be closing in the next 5 minutes. If you could please use this time to make your final selections and bring them to the nearest register for a fast and curious check out. Thank you for shopping at Goodwill and have yourself a great night!"
Susan was always the one making the announcements. Her voice was just made to be heard. She had been an employee here for a year already. She was attending the last customer who was purchasing some sheets.
I never understood that. Buying used sheets from Goodwill, just seemed gross. I know we as the employees here have to spray down all our linens with antibacterial spray as a percaution but I cant help but imagine the God awful things that has happened on those sheets. A murder? or worse... Sex!
I shudder but continue to sweep the floor that never gets clean. I call it the "impostfloor." Get it? It's supposed to be a floor but its anything but, so it's an imposter.

Oh, nevermind..

The dust I push together with the pathetic excuse of a broom Goodwill has generously cursed us with flies into the air as I attempt to sweep it into the dust pan. Just like that the particles of dead skin cells return back to the once dark blue floor making it into an ashy gray.
Susan locked the front store doors and walked back to the office with her blue envelope that has all the money Goodwill made today. I walk to the closet in the stockroom and return the broom and dustpan in exchange for our mop and bucket. I fill the bucket with hot water and put some Fabuloso into it. The water is clear and bubbly. It doesn't last long because I stick the black mop that was once white into the hot tub and it is no longer clear but black.

I don't get paid enough for this.

The floor is just a muddy mess whenever I'm through with it. It takes me a good 15 minutes to mop the entire store just for it to dry with muddy streaks by the end of the night. I've argued with our manager Carl about making us mop something that is impossible to clean but he insists we need to.

$7.25 isn't enough to continue working in this hell hole. I do it anyway.

I knock onto the office door.

"Hey, Carl. It's already 9:00 and everything is clean out there, can I take off?"

Carl looks at me as though I spoke a language he couldn't understand. Maybe if he wasn't staring at my tits as I asked my question he would've provided an answer quicker.

Instead of an answer he just looks back at his desk and continues to count money. Susan is sitting next to him in the office and answers for him.

"Just dump the trash and you can go home."

I smile and nod as I close the door.

Who made that bitch manager?

I drag my feet to the back of the store and open up the doors. I take one big black bag of trash with me to the dumpster. Crickets chirp loudly with every step I take until I get to close and they fall silent.

Huh. Reminds me of some of my coworkers.

I toss the garbage into the dumpster and instead of the loud bang that I normally here coming from it hitting the dumpster floor I am surprised with loud tires screeching close to me. I jump terrified as bright headlights blind my eyes. This huge black van is no more than 5 feet away from me. I'm getting ready to scream for help thinking the people inside are going to kidnap me or something when I see some guy in a hoodie get out of the van, run to the back of our store and return to the van in less the 3 minutes and just like that they were gone.

My whole body is shaking and my heart is beating out of my chest. I rush to the back of our store so I can tell "Bitch" and "Pervert" about what just happened when I stepped on some kind of wood.

Right outside our donation section, under my worn out flats was a really old looking wooden Ouija Board. I step off of it and pick it up. It's really heavy. I look around the floor wondering where the indicator is but it's no where to be found. Honestly, I wasn't really interested in spending anymore time on this potential horror movie plot anyways. I take the board with me and close and lock the back doors behind me.

Bitchy Susan and Perverted Carl are walking out of the office at this point and I meet them with this wooden-demon-summoning-thing in my hands and yell out, "YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO ME OUTSIDE!"

My story was told at the top of my lungs as I let out all my emotions that I kept within my chest from the dumpster to the office and when I ended with, "AND THEN I FOUND THIS THING! HOW CREEPY IS THAT!?" Holding up the board I'm expecting a similar reaction to mine. Carl is still looking at my breasts and Susan is looking at the board while holding onto her crucifix that I never knew she had under her shirt.

"Girl, you shouldn't have touched that." she said.

I take that all in and think about all the scary movies I have ever watched. I'm not religious or anything but I have seen "the exorcism" to many times to be a skeptic. I sure as hell didn't want to grab Susan's cruicifix and start jabbing into my vagina. No thanks!

"Just throw it in the donation box over there. We'll put it out tomorrow." Carl said as he locked the office.

Without hesitation I launched the devil's telephone into the donation bin. Apart of me was pretty concerned with who we were going to sell it to tomorrow without them knowing the creepy state in which we received it but I was too busy replaying "The Conjuring 2" in my mind to care all that much.

We all grabbed our stuff and left Goodwill that night.

I'm not sure I ever want to go back there. I could see the store decreasing in size within my rear-view mirror. I head home, get into bed and go to sleep. I have work at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow morning.