POP-UP

I came to the pop-up shop looking for a lip-plumping balm. A YouTuber from Hong Kong with a Houston accent told me to buy it. Her upload was sandwiched between her nighttime skincare routine and her story of childhood sexual abuse. The shop was upholstered in the brand’s signature lantanas, spilled on lurid carpet, fuzzy. The wallpaper was a kaleidoscope of the brand’s typeface intertwined with those same flowers, and some browns, trying to evoke a 1970s living room perhaps, only chic by virtue of it not being the 1970s anymore.

The shop girls wore jumpsuits. I was wearing one too, but that was a choice I’d made in the morning. All my own. The shop didn't do that to me.

            Ten minutes passed. I couldn’t find my plumping balm. I asked after it and one of the jumpsuited figures pulled out a glowing tablet. The whites of her eyes became blue as she scrolled, and after some silence, the silence of her search, she said: “It works on eyes as well.”

            The purchase took a long time; a message had to be sent from the tablet to a packaging area, and after paying I took a seat on an upholstered footstool and waited. It looked just like one belonging to my grandmother, who died before I was born. The woman who handed me my bag tried to whisper something to me, but I didn’t catch it, so I smiled quick and awkward, and I also nodded, for some reason. I went to retrace my steps to the exit, but the outside world wasn’t where I’d left it. Another room with the same flower carpet, the same flower walls, this time in different, gently contrasting colors. I went backwards the way I’d just come: a new room, but the same. This time lavender and just-darker-than-lavender. Huh. Funny.

            I continued to try to retrace my steps, and found more sections of the pop-up, with the same products, labeled pristinely, and more women in jumpsuits who didn’t quite meet my eye.

            Hours passed, and then I had a tablet. I don’t know how it got there. It glowed in my hand. I still looked for a way out, I couldn’t tell you for how long, but after a while my eyes grew used to the colors. I don’t find them so lurid anymore.

            People come up to me now, asking for the signature exfoliating tonic or the iconic mascara that’s famous for not looking too much like mascara. Once, maybe a month ago (an hour ago?) a teenager asked me about the lip plumper. I decided to check for her. Really look, you know? It took me a while, and I could see something happening to the teenager – or rather, something behind her shoulder shifting, a little liquid loosening to her outline. But I didn't let it distract me.

Red text on my screen. “Ah,” I said to her. “It’s been discontinued.”

by Arianna Reiche

Arianna is an American writer living in east London. Her work has been published by Ambit, Popshot, Joyland, SAND Journal, and Glimmer Train. She was nominated for the 2020 Bridport Prize and the PANK Magazine Book Contest. She also won the 2021 Tupelo Quarterly Prose Prize this past March.