This is a short story of a girl and her Halloween costume.

She was anxious to find her costume. Halloween was 2 shrinking days away. Around her were circular racks overweight with clothing filling a thrift-store as people both alone and in packs sauntered in and dispersed to the corners. Holding her breath and listening she could hear a steady music-bed of mumbling people and the felted whisper of shirts and pants and coats being plucked and examined. She could hear her dad talking about shoes and how much better it was to buy shoes for a 9 year old here rather than the mall.

It was an urgent moment in a fantasy store and having seen the decorations in the storefront heralding the Halloween booty to be found inside she knew she was in the right place. It was time to demand a costume purchase.

The store itself was a mess, as stores like this always are. With fickle and entitled people flitting and moving too many things too fast. Item after item returned askew to the rack or lumped over in a dog-pile of the rejected. Only the weakest attempts had been made to help sustain the child-like indexing of clothes by style and color.

It was a barnyard of fabrics. The smellll! Unlike any place she had ever been. It was a flytrap of punchy micro layers that had met her at the door and grew more and more seismic with each exploring step. A patchouli carnival here, one that mingled drunkenly with the warm underlying scents of wet mutt fragrance and used textiles. All of them distinct, with sour sweets and starches and the occasional blast of leather and a smoky cigarette lilt.

Much of the smell was the dying carpets fault. Poor carpet. The carpeting was sadly beat up and cancerously lumped, like the old red velvet guitar lining of the singing street musicians guitar case they had passed walking here. It looked like spaghetti sauce spread unevenly around a cookie sheet. With grooves worked into it from herded shoppers with their plodding shoes acting like the backs of spoons. All following a path to new stuff that was waiting to be united with its new, more adoring owner.  

She could see the Halloween costumes by the rows of bent and disfigured Fairy wings. Covered with broken strips of gold and silver lamé and white stockings stretched over clothes hangers. Bumblebee stripes and disco pants were hung next to each other like costume cousins from a BurningMan wedding. The mix was scandalous and wrong, and she was being moved from one genre to another. She pulled separate pieces out and tried to find some sliver of identifiable  costume amid the abandoned bits of party garb, but quickly saw that this was a place where professionals put together costumes like veterans at a salad bar, who piled plates high with a steady flow of separates, that come together in harmony once they reach their table. 

She called for her Dad in a needy tone, "I need you and your brain, the shoes will wait, more important matters at hand!?"

He called back, "what is it?" 

She pleaded "help me find a costume for Halloween?"

He emerged from below a rack with a pair of white Nikes, looking anxious and hot. He squeezed through a few boxes and politely waited for two ladies to approve a sweater consideration and walked toward her. She could see his "let's get out of here" energy with every step. He stopped hard a few feet from her and looked quickly at the rack, reached in and pulled out a sleazy lady cop outfit, and said "this will look real good on you, you can bust kids for being tricksters and tax their candy bags."

She could only grit her teeth and wince, not really seeing why he laughed when he said it. 

He curled his smile, put the cop outfit up to her shoulders, looked her up and down and dismissively slipped it back into the pile, missing the rack and leaving it hanging by fabric friction against a well used black cape and a pair of plastic camel colored chaps. His hand darted around, moving the hangers, flicking items with carelessness. He bit his lip and sighed, looking down the disheveled row, eyeballing some white nylon wings at the end of the line.

"you're a bit of fairy yeah?" he said directly to her.

"ummmmm....sure, that could work, for sure, but only if the wings look right and don't have holes." This made her nervous. It was all she could utter because she could see that this conversation had found the end of the sidewalk. The whole costume was there, ivory tights, a  purple shirt that was threaded with string up the middle, and the wings fit snugly into the garment in the back. It would work just fine. He gave a a quick look at the price tag, she watched his eyes to see what they told, and saw the green lights she had hoped for. 

"well lets get those wings and fly then, yeah?"

She was a fairy, she knew she would have friends that were fairies, there would be no explaining what she was to anyone. She was a fairy. Costume settled.

They were in the bag in minutes and to the door right after. As she walked out she paused and looked around, a mirror to her left showed her next to her dad. They looked alike, the two of them, walking out onto the street together, each with a white bag. They passed a bearded young man playing guitar singing to a sidewalk filled lazy with people. She listened to the young man, he was asking the Lord to buy him a Mercedes Benz, and as she passed he looked up and said "happy Halloween FruitFly!"

Her Dad laughed and nudged her along.