[Ed. note: Previous tales of life as a Witch in retail can be found here.]
Shortly after our grand opening, a local houseless dude named J. T. took to occasionally hanging out in the store. I was not 100% comfortable with this — he’d been banned from pretty much every other establishment in the Gayborhood — but he wasn’t disruptive, and a lot of our customers seemed to know him and were happy to chat him up, so I figured he deserved a clean slate. I kept an eye on him but mostly just left him to his own devices.
Over time, though, we started noticing odd happenings around the shop that coincided with J. T.’s visits. The framed prints in the restroom would switch places; a mannequin would be missing an accessory, which would turn up on another mannequin across the sales floor; a collection of jockstraps would be facing the wrong direction. Eventually, we came to understand that J. T. was quietly rearranging the merchandise when we weren’t looking.
He wasn’t causing any actual damage, but it was an annoyance. So the next time he came in, we watched him carefully, and when he started to move a stack of T-shirts from one shelf to another, we politely but firmly told him to put them back where they belonged.
We didn’t see J. T. for a few months after that, until this past Friday, when he wandered in during a rush. My employee Cyrus and I were both on duty, but between all the customers, we couldn’t keep track of him. By the time we’d gotten everyone taken care of, J. T. had pulled products from their packages, removed art from the walls, and stuffed a handful of cryptic messages into the suggestion box by the dressing rooms.
Politeness was officially out the window, and we directed him, in no uncertain terms, to knock off the shenanigans. This did… not go over well: J. T. got agitated and left in huff, returning a few minutes later with an old towel, which he dropped on the front counter.
“I’m throwing in the towel,” he said flatly, which would’ve honestly been kind of funny under any other circumstance but was unnerving in the present. He immediately stalked out again, only to open the door one more time, pulling a pair of denim shorts out of the battered suitcase he’d stashed on our porch and tossing them across the room before storming off down the street.
Cyrus and I spent a few quality moments staring blankly at each other, and then I commenced with reorganizing the disarray, while Cyrus fished J. T.’s notes out of the suggestion box. They were largely incoherent but signed with his full, legal name, and it occurred to me that J. T. had unwittingly provided me with a good number of taglocks, which I could easily use to bind him from the entering the store.
And… I didn’t do it.
I don’t have a good reason as to why I didn’t do it — I could’ve barricaded myself in my office and Chaos Witched up some results, and no one would’ve been the wiser. But ultimately, I just didn’t feel like doing it right then and there. Instead, I informed Cyrus that if J. T. ever came back, he had my permission to bar him from the premises. Cuttle showed up soon after for his closing shift, and Cyrus got him up to speed while I clocked out for the day and headed home.
Cuttle phoned frantically an hour later. J. T. had in fact come back and, when told he was no longer allowed onsite, had snatched a baseball cap off a nearby display and made a break for it. Cyrus, who has the self-preservation instincts of a sunfish, launched out the door behind him and managed to get a hand on the hat, but J. T. had it in a death grip and swung around violently, slamming Cyrus into the side of the building.
Startled by the crash, Cuttle rushed outside to find Cyrus and J. T. engaged in a furious tug of war, with Cyrus screaming, “GIVE ME THE HAT,” and J. T. inexplicably screaming, “IT IS NOT A HAT.” Cuttle dove into the fray and, with an adrenaline-fueled jerk, liberated the (now utterly demolished) headwear, at which point he and Cyrus ran inside, locked the door, and dialed the police, while J. T. fled into the twilight.
The cops promptly appeared three hours later to take statements, explaining that they would not could not offer much assistance: It was all, “But please don’t hesitate to call if he murders you.” Begrudgingly accepting that there was nothing else to be done, Cuttle and Cyrus let it go and went on with the rest of their evening.
I was blitzed on Advil PM when the text messages started piling in, so I didn’t see them until the following morning, but apparently, J. T. had returned one last time, covering the porch in garbage and scrawling gibberish on and around the door with a Sharpie. (Cuttle had gone out after work and spotted the blight when he passed by on the way to his apartment.) J. T. had also shredded a sleeping bag and emptied out the lining, so when I arrived to open and stepped out of my car, I was greeted with a surreal billow of goose down.
It wasn’t hard to clean up the mess: There were no biohazards in the refuse, and Sharpie comes off with rubbing alcohol. But I couldn’t help fixating on the binding that I never got around to performing. Would it have prevented J. T. from shoplifting and vandalizing our property? No telling. But not casting the spell certainly didn’t do anything to help.
Which brings us to the moral of the story: Cast the damn spell, y’all.
There is a persistent idea within occult spaces that magic should only be used as a last resort, when all mundane efforts have failed. But the truth is that magic can — and should — be used whenever we want, especially when we perceive a need for it. I’m doing work now to make sure J. T. stays gone for good, but I also maybe wouldn’t have had to spend my morning scrubbing graffiti and sweeping feathers into the wind if I’d made even a moderate magical effort when the inspiration originally hit.
If your intuition is telling you that a given situation calls for Witchcraft, trust your gut, get proactive, and cast the spell. Doing so will never make anything worse, but not doing so most certainly might.
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