Easy Bake Ovens, Barbie Dolls and Bombs

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Easy Bake Ovens, Barbie Dolls and Bombs

By Plot Roach

It’s never a good idea to fill kids’ toys with explosives…

So there I was, working the graveyard shift with Emily and trying to get our section inventoried before the end of our shift, when we heard a noise coming from the back gate. Now you have to understand that the graveyard shift is usually very quiet. The worst thing that you have to worry about is snoozing when the boss walks in. Too many people have been caught doing this, or worse, on their shifts. So now the boss not only has us clean up the place, he makes us inventory it as well. Not that the inventory actually does any good. Between what the customers walk off with and what the people working register fail to ring through right… well, you get the idea.

So Emily and I were working the toy section, halfway through the count we starting making up totals just to mess with the boss’ head. I mean, who really has five thousand Barbie rodeo costumes on a single shelf? Besides, Emily and I were bemoaning the fact that they were changing the Easy bake Oven from a light bulb to an actual heating element. I never had one as a kid, my parents thought that it was too dangerous and I told Emily as much.

“I burned myself a couple of times.” she said, showing me a as mall crescent shape scar on her thumb. “But if you don’t learn to be careful as a kid, you end up being a stupid adult. I mean, look at all those people they have to air lift out of state parks because someone had a midlife crisis and decided to find God while walking around in nature. They don’t take any classes, they don’t stay on the trail. Half the time they don’t even take enough water. And if they get attacked by a bear, it’s the bear that gets shot. So the poor thing just wakes up in the morning, smells the candy wrapper from some idiot that he left on the trail and decides that littering isn’t cool in his hood…”

“From kid’s toys to thug bears. You have a talent, Emily.”

“I try.” she said. “But in all honesty, we had fun with it. I had revenge on my brother when he barbequed my Barbies.”

“How?” I asked, almost afraid of the response.

“I used to turn his green army men into plastic hockey pucks. And then there was the time I actually made a mud pie out of mud, mixed it right in with the brownies and he never knew it until his molars came down on a rock.”

We were deep into reminiscing about childhood toys when the back door rattled. It sounded like someone was pulling real hard on the handle. But it was an emergency door, so it would only open from the inside.

“Should we open it you think?” Emily asked.

“Won’t the alarm go off?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I think that maybe we could go to security and see from the camera who it is.” So we dropped out clipboard of false inventory and headed down to see Sam in Security. When we got there, he was already watching the footage from the camera above the back emergency door.

“It’s a bear.” he said, with apathy. It was almost as if he said, ‘It’s the pizza delivery guy.’

“What kind of bear?” Emily asked.

“A bear, kind of bear.”

“No, I mean. Is it a grizzly, a brown bear, a polar bear?”

“Polar? Here?” Sam asked.

“It could happen.” Emily said.

“Yeah.” I said. “Didn’t you even see that show ‘Lost’, they sent one to Tunisia.”

Both of them glared at me for that comment. Okay, maybe I deserved it.

“It’s smallish and dark.” Sam finally said. We watched it pound against the outside door. We laughed, thinking ourselves safe against it. Then it walked to a nearby window and broke through it. “Oh crap!” Sam yelled, locking the door to the security office. And much to our amusement, the bear did not go to the food aisle, as any hungry bear who had just broken into a store would have, it went down the toy aisle, where Emily and I had been just moments earlier.

It made a quick perusal of the shelves, sniffing at the dolls and little girls’ makeup. It batted at the tubes of bubbles and chewed experimentally on a stuffed animal rabbit that was supposed to smell like strawberries. And I can tell you from experience, it did not. When you are surrounded by a dozen of the synthetic beasts, all you smell is a bad chemical residue that reminds one of overly sweet bathroom deodorizers.

The bear shared my opinion, having dropped the rabbit in favor of another toy. What had now caught its interest was a plush horse that made whinnying sounds when you touched it. But when the bear knocked it down off the shelf, it also knocked down a jewelry box.

A tinkling tune was caught on the camera, as was the dance of the small dark bear. That’s right, it stood upright, steadied itself upon a nearby shelf, causing even more toys to fall, and then began to turn in a lazy spiral, waving its upper paws in the air.

“Is that?-”

“It couldn’t be.”

“It’s dancing.” I said.

Again, I received glares from Emily and Sam.

“What do we do now?” Sam asked.

“You’re the security guy” Emily said. “What did they train you to do?”

“Uh…”

“Try calling animal control and the police.” I offered. Twenty minutes later we were still on the phone with animal control. They said that they didn’t want to trap the bear inside the store, just in case it should harm an employee. I still think it’s because they didn’t want a lawsuit from the store. So they told us to try an ‘shoo’ it out by making loud noises.

Air horns were in the fishing department, on the other side of toys. So we would have to travel past the bear to get to them.

“What about noisemakers from the party supply department? Emily asked.

“Unless it is deathly afraid of confetti, I doubt it would work.” Sam said.

“So what do we try?” Emily asked.

“We need to get to sporting goods…” Sam said.

Ten minutes last we were holed up once again in the security office. But this time with a box cutter, black powder, clothesline and rubber balls. “I read about this online in one of the survival forums.” Sam said, putting together an assembly line of handmade grenades.

“If we were going to kill the bear, why didn’t we just get the shotgun?” Emily asked.

“We’re not going to kill the bear.” Sam said. “It’s an endangered species here.”

“If it’s so endangered, then why is it in the city?” Emily asked.

“It’s probably here looking for food because someone built a mall on its home.” I said.

“Spoken like a liberal.” Sam sighed, "The animal control guys think that it was the one that they confiscated from a circus a while back and was released into the woods a mile from here to repopulate the species." he said, pouring black powder into a rubber ball that he had cut open with the box cutter. “Now don’t fill the ball too much, or it really will explode and hurt him.” He stuffed a section of rope into the opening on the ball, lit it and threw it at the bear.

And then there was nothing. Absolute nothing. The bear was still there, and we were still crouched around the corner. But the ‘grenade’ didn’t explode. Sam threw the others, and none of them exploded. So we grabbed a few more balls, this time from the kids’ section (since we were already there).

Sam kept an eye on the bear while Emily and I made the next grenades. “I think this is stupid.” Emily said, pouring the black powder into the ball and filling it up.

“Isn’t that too much?” I asked.

“The last ones didn’t catch fire and go off.” Emily said. “I’m betting Sammy boy didn’t put in enough stuff.”

I shrugged and stood back. It seemed the safest thing to do under the circumstances. Emily handed one of her super filled balls to Sam who lit the fuse and launched it at the bear. But this time, the bear decided to send it back.

The ball went flying over our heads and into the kitchen wares department. “Don’t worry” said Sam. “If it’s anything like the others, it’s a dud.”

But it wasn’t.

It exploded with a ferocity like the cherry bombs Emily’s brother allegedly flushed down toilets in his youth, according to the stories she told later of the ‘bear incident’. It knocked over an entire aisle of appliances and sent bits of broken ceramics into the air to land everywhere between pool supplies to electronics.

But it did chase the bear out.

When the boss asked us the next day what had happened, we blamed it on kids who were trying to form a protest on foreign made toys. The ball bombs were confiscated by Sam at an earlier date and he was going to dispose of them. But then there was this bear invasion and we feared for our lives. Thus we were forced to use them…

In response, we were sentenced to three more shifts of inventory. ACTUAL inventory.