It's just like every other day at work. Shove empty boxes down the compactor. Fill the shelves. Fight off the eldritch beast that's crawling out of the compactor. The usual stuff. 
“Put Me in the Trash”
by Terry Echoes
There were a few nice new products on sale at Klyder’s Department Store that quarter, but the lime jello marshmallow cottage cheese surprise was not one of them. Clyde Igglesby wanted to retch at the label of the dense, bowl-shaped, cheap-plastic package he held in his hand. He wondered how much longer he’d have left to work here as he unloaded fifteen boxes of the noxious concoction. He couldn’t believe one tub of the stuff cost almost as much as a pack of Oreos™, and he knew those were over-priced. Why, just the other day he’d walked into a gas station to do his shopping and saw they were up over six bucks. 
His lips must’ve still be curled back in irritation because the next question he heard was, “Is something wrong?” 
Clyde whipped his head round and looked up. Teetering before him was an elderly-looking man, with a squarish muzzle, graying fur, and a permanent look of bewilderment in his eyes. His antlers were short and split as though it’d been many a year since they’d last seen any growth. The man hunched over a cane, with his other arm at his back. 
Clyde jumped to his feet and clapped his hands together. “Not at all, sir! How may I help you today?” The words pounded out of him as if playing back from an old cassette tape. Clyde wanted so much to check out his brain and go on autopilot whenever a customer came up to him, but in practice he felt like he was riding a rocket tied to one wrist. Please don’t smell weird. Please don’t smell weird, he pleaded in his head in regards to the old man. Thankfully all he could smell was the freon from the cooler section he’d been stocking. 
“Where might I find the bathroom, young man?” The old man smiled. 
He wished the old man wouldn’t smile. Old men using the bathroom was not something you smiled about. 
“Ah, it’s to the back of the store. If you follow the light blue arrows along the top walls, you can find it.” 
Then the old man asked, “Could you help me?” 
Clyde wanted to die. He didn’t consider himself some studded-leather-adorned, black-clad emo kid, but he wanted to die right then and there and let himself be the problem for a change, rather than somebody’s means to an end. “I can help you find it,” he said. That wouldn’t be so bad. He was bound to be late for his mandatory lunch break anyhow because unloading an entire pallet by himself in that amount of time was impossible, but if he’d been helping a customer—which was Klyder’s primary agenda, the hollow facsimile of giving a damn about its cash cows—he’d have an excuse when Charlene came to reprimand him. That was the only time Charlene left the cash office—to chastise her peons. All that could be given up if his body only gave up living on the spot. He liked to imagine a dead employee rotting on the floor would drive Charlene bonkers, but he could already see her eyes rolling, hear her tongue clicking, and hear her saying, “Men!” 
The old man said nothing, so Clyde awkwardly turned his back on him and tried to guess how irredeemably slow a pace at which the elder could follow. He put one foot forward with only a foot’s length in between his last step and walked like that down to the end of the aisle, only to find the customer hadn’t gotten past the bread shelves yet. This was going to be one of those evenings. 
But as was more often than not the case (but not always), the trial proved to be a non-event. Clyde kept shuffling his feet, stopping, shuffling his feet, stopping. At one point he thought to himself, in jest, Joke’s on you, old man. You’re not getting me in trouble ‘cause I’m helping a customer. He reached the small beige, dimly-lit hallway that contained the public restrooms and the two drinking fountains (the taller one tasted of rust, but the child-height one was passable in an emergency), then did an about face. He sifted his way through the customers on his way back to the dairy aisle like he was practicing some sort of ballroom dance routine. Back to it. 
When he was finished, he collected up all the flattened cardboard boxes in a cart and pushed it to the dank backroom. The cardboard compactor was way past receiving, near the station where an old man named Wally worked repairing bicycles. 
Wally was a quiet, smiling older man, with thinning hair, and a spiky tail with two dark stripes running along its tan coat. He had more than a few whiskers arcing back from his dark, button nose. Clyde liked Wally and almost envied Wally’s job. Just fixing bicycles all day in the back, not associating with customers, seemed like the ideal job to Clyde. Maybe it wasn’t envy, really, because of how Clyde took to Wally, even though they scarcely interacted. Clyde always had the feeling Wally didn’t really think of him any different from the other employees. Perhaps it was like a non-romantic crush of sorts, to respect a humble man he didn’t know all that well. He always made sure to wave, shoot him a hello, and receiving one in kind. 
Tonight, as Clyde was turning to leave, Wally spoke up. “You’re not just leaving that there, are you?” Wally was polishing what looked to be a wrench with a filthy rag. 
Clyde pointed at the compactor machine with both hands. “I have to clock out for my mandatory lunch break, but I promise I will come straight back here after clocking back in and put them in the baler.” He flashed his teeth at Wally, hoping with all his heart that Wally would believe him. Why shouldn’t he? Clyde managed to keep his word, even working against the managers at times to see things through. He despised his work, but he didn’t shirk it unless he had to stop in the middle of something for a state-mandated break and someone else just up and finished his job for him without his asking. Clyde hated when that happened. It made him feel like he owed somebody, but he didn’t know who, for a favor he hadn’t needed. 
Wally didn’t even make a sound. He just turned around with his eyes lingering on Clyde until his back was to him. This silence fell like a weight on Clyde’s shoulders, and he felt a revelation take him. Wally wasn’t going to acknowledge a promise from him until he did it. Well, damn it, Clyde was going to bale that cardboard like nobody’s business. Just as soon as he came back from break. 
Clyde spent his break staring at all the unpalatable items in the break room vending machine. The break room was painted a maddening yellow, the color of insanity. It was a funny choice in color. In the smoke room, the plenum ceiling was way more yellow than the paint in here. Clyde curled his tail around into his lap and groomed it with his hands without thinking. He hated the compactor. It was the most overtly dangerous object in the building he could think of, aside from customers bludgeoning each other with the axes from the housewares department, or chopping at each other with machetes from sporting goods, or firing off bebe guns from the same. And they tried, too. Not often, but they did try. 
The other reason he hated the compactor was because of the time he misinterpreted a manager’s words and thrown out some sort of end cap display. That was a year ago, and he still felt like an ass for it. He thudded his cheek onto the filthy table and stared at the ugly wall covered in a wild mishmash of work-related postings and wished he was dead. Dead, he would no longer feel the burrowing embarrassment in himself at his mistake. He’d fooled himself into believing that the manager must have said something else that couldn’t have been misinterpreted the way he’d done. Did he really want to die for it, though? 
Last summer, some Italian kid named Didimo, who had a big bushy tail and speckled gray fur, had worked alongside him in the automotive department. Didimo didn’t last long, but Clyde didn’t know why he left. He thought it had something to do with the couple of times he caught Didimo crying in the aisle. Clyde had been startled by the way Didimo rose up and froze his features into a neutral expression. His eyes were bleary and red, making it unmistakable what he’d been doing, and his nose was stuffy afterward. Clyde wondered if he was going to turn into Didimo by working here for much longer. That was the last thing he wanted. 
Lunch breaks had the bizarre effect of feeling incredibly short while at the same time dragging on into monotony. Clyde clocked back in, almost walked out onto the floor, and remembered his promise. He skedaddled back to the receiving area and found his cart was still there. Good, he thought. Nobody made me look like I’m slacking off. He waved to Wally, but Wally wasn’t looking in his direction, so Clyde began filling up the compactor with the cardboard. As usual, it was overfilled. Since he wasn’t the one who originally overfilled it, Clyde decided to roll the carriage back out onto the floor where it belonged. 
Wally stopped him. “You gotta press it down.” That was all it took to make Clyde jog back to the machine and take responsibility for everyone else. 
The compactor machine was an ugly, rusty orange contraption with a big hydraulic press overhead, looming above a solid square container whose front side acted as a pair of doors. There was a big red button on the side that you had to hold down to press the cardboard together. Clyde didn’t like putting his hands underneath the hydraulic press, but he had to straighten out the cardboard so that none of it was sticking out over the edges. Once this was done, he approached the button and gave it a quick, nervous tap. There was a momentary hum as the compactor shook, then stopped. 
“You gotta hold the button down,” Wally said. 
Clyde knew that, but didn’t say so. Instead, he held the button down and washed the hydraulic press lower down, mindless and stubborn, with little disregard for its purpose. It pressed into the cardboard all while Clyde worried some would fall, but the machine proceeded to shove down all of it. All those boxes, all that recyclable junk that public education promised city infrastructure would recycle, compressed, flatter and flatter, though it wouldn’t get much smaller. The high-pitched hum turned into a dull moan, and Clyde hesitated to realize it was at its limit. There was another button on the controls for raising the press back up, so he pressed that, but it didn’t budge. 
That was strange. Instead, the machine made a crazy noise like squealing tires, only over and over and over as long as Clyde held the button. “What the hell?” 
“It’s jammed,” said Wally. 
Clyde grimaced. He didn’t know how to un-jam the compactor. How had it jammed, anyway? He couldn’t understand the principle behind such a problem. He also noticed that the compactor doors had a padlock on them, meaning he couldn’t un-jam the cardboard by himself. Which meant tracking down a manager. Which would turn into a whole thing, he was certain. 
The machine let out a terrific bang that made Clyde almost jump out of his skin. Even Wally backed into his tool desk, knocking over the upturned wheel he’d been working on. The compactor banged again, like a cherry bomb had gone off inside it, and this time Clyde noticed the hydraulic press bounce. Before he could think, a third bang sounded out and Clyde was pressed up against the wall, just beside the corner that led to the rest of the backroom. 
Then the compactor ripped open in a cacophonous explosion of screaming metal and hissing. The padlock flung apart, its shank skidding up against Clyde’s feet, causing him to jump against the wall. All the dust and grime that had built up over the sorrowful years erupted in a plume of smoke that yawned forth across the floor. Clyde cowered on the floor, his arms outstretched against the wall behind him, his tail shivering between his legs, as he saw what emerged from the smoke. 
Folds of cardboard sprang open, zig-zagged like an accordion. Boxes popped open, and sections hinged forth like the jaws of a terrible beast. Two triangular sections glowered down at Clyde like dark eye sockets. Sharp, jagged cardboard teeth lined the gigantic maw of the thing. It lumbered, almost on four legs, its front limbs swiveling with its elongated reach. Looming before him, rising almost to the height of the backroom itself, was something like a cardboard dinosaur. Its belly sagged, undulating with every breath, every guttural roar the unreal creature issued forth. Its long tail dragged across the floor, whipping this way and that. Pointed corners of cardboard jutted along its back like jagged spines. 
Clyde was no longer thinking. He was on autopilot. Things like this didn’t exist. Shouldn’t exist. His fingers curled around something solid. He wasn’t sure what it was; its surface wasn’t exactly smooth, but the object had some heft to it. He stood, launching himself forward, and whipped his anonymous weapon right into the corrugated monster’s chest. There was a dry THOK! as he connected, but Clyde could see he barely made more than a dent. Perhaps the torso was reinforced from within. 
It didn’t matter. The creature was upon him. Its long arms stretched toward him, and soon its massive hands clamped around his torso. Clyde could only scream as he was lifted into the air. The monster opened its maw wide, and Clyde’s face was lowered toward its gaping mouth. His mind buzzed with panic, arguing with itself. Cardboard couldn’t hurt him, could it? It couldn’t eat him like some angry predator. But cardboard also didn’t move of its own accord, or form monstrous shapes on its own prerogative. 
The monster dropped him with a sudden wail of pain, lumbering sideways and against the garage doors. Clyde wondered what the hell happened. On the other side of the creature, Wally was holding a blow torch and a can of spray paint. He was emanating fireballs at the beast, backing it against the doors. When he and Clyde exchanged looks, he threw Clyde a key, then gestured as though he was pulling down hard on something. The garage doors! Clyde scampered to his feet and grasped the long, dangling chain that was used to open the garages. He used Wally’s key to unlock the padlock on the chain as fast as he could, then started pulling harder and faster than he ever thought he could to open the receiving doors. 
As cool November night air billowed in on them, Wally kept shooting fireball after fireball, tormenting the beast, damaging it, chasing it. It fell outside the doors and plummeted down onto the pavement below. Clyde watched in amazement as the whole thing crumpled into a heap, into a mass of spread-out, burning, collapsed cardboard. His heart still pounded in his chest as he and Wally looked out onto the mess, and neither man could think of what to say to one another. Neither of them had any answers for the questions on their minds.