Once upon a time there was a lamp that smelled of sheit

Because I have expensive habits that I refuse to give up, such as eating and accumulating belongings, I have taken a job in a shop by the town square. I sell lamps. Big lamps, small lamps, round lamps, square lamps, tall lamps, short lamps… I sell them all, I’m not half bad at it, if I must say so myself.

And you know I must.

However, I’ve been handed a bit of a challenge. It’s a perversion of a lamp. Sure, it looked pretty enough when it was still inside the box. On the picture it looked great. All tall and elegant and whatnot.

So we started putting the pieces together. It’s a big, fancy lamp with swirly-looking bits on it. It was a job for two people. But it didn’t take long before realisation struck that what we were building wasn’t quiiite the same thing as in the picture on the box. For one thing, OUR lamp was crooked. Actually, that’s an understatement worthy of a government cover-up. The more we built on it, the more crooked it became.

It was worse than the annual ‘is the christmas tree straight’ dialogue. Only there was no earthly way to straighten this particular Christmas tree.

There was also another odd thing about the lamp. It smelled bad. To be blunt, it smelled like…well…like something that came out of someone’s colon. That’s right, it smelled like shit. And after we’d touched it, WE smelled like shit. Not only that but after we then touched the counter, IT smelled like shit.

It had to be scrubbed down. The counter, that is. The lamp was beyond help.

Every once in a while, a customer will ask us if we have any merchandise other then what is displayed in the store. This has always struck me as a very silly question. As if we’d have a secret lamp-room hidden away in the back, the way that some bars have secret rooms for high-stake poker games. At times I have played with the idea of asking “do you know the secret handshake?” when someone offered that particular question.

Now we have the Sheit Lamp. The frightening monstrosity of glass and warped metal, hidden away in the darkest corner of the storage room. So the next time someone asks me for secret merchandise, I’ll show them that. No doubt their screams will be heard all the way across the town square.