Nikki Barnhart

She had only applied to work in the Halloween store because she thought it would be temporary. But this store was open year-round—the building owned, not leased, by a man named Ed, who was thin and wiry, nostalgic and ambiguous as a figure in a Grant Wood painting. The devotion he extended to the rows of ludicrous masks and cackling witch animatronics seemed more suited to the motions of a farmer, tending to something whose harvest would keep people alive, rather than fleetingly amused.  Ed preferred silent, solitary work: keeping inventory, tracking shipments in the back room he seemed to…