Frozen in step, I tried to calibrate identifying what was watching me in the empty, abandoned parking lot of the mall. Turning my head, my stomach lurched as I saw a scruffy bear mascot head supporting the delivery bay door perched on its head. 

Two eyes, one vacant the other empty, stared out as an eternal sentinel for the threshold between nature and decaying temple. Behind it stood a black yawning maw. It held promise of untold stories behind it, but also felt like it might awaken if approached. As if life got close if it would remember what it was like to hunger and realize that it hadn’t been fed for years. 

My mind paused contemplating what had been delivered through those doors. If the spirit of that gateway would have been sustained through the activities of mindless rote business life. 

Frustrations of drivers not paid enough. Unloaders who would rather go home and sleep. Each with their own weight, their own story. And perhaps that black doorway created only out of necessity absorbed all of it. Maybe that’s why those workers were so tired? That space lurked innocent in plain sight, but ravenous when left unchecked. And now as collaborator, the brown bear head watched for its next meal. 

Truthfully, it was the bear head that had more of my interest. I wondered how long it had been out there. Its fur was still clean and general shape sustained.

The blackness of the missing eye had no less depth than the blue-eyed placeholder for the other. At first it seemed like casual wear, but that didn’t feel quite right. 

And then I wondered if that dark maw behind it couldn’t wait for life and instead swallowed up half of the bear’s sight. Perhaps it thought if it ate that eye the bear would know to try harder to lure life in. To threaten it with blindness if it didn’t comply. Either way they kept their secrets.

My chest collapsed with sadness as I felt the stirring of spirit within that eternally lifeless mascot head. Manufactured, its Spirit would have slept content in its container. And over the years as humans wore it and children greeted it. The spirit would have slowly woken up. Not actively, just casually. Observant as a bird on a wire seeing what just happens to be around it. Such is the way of many animistic born Spirits. 

But that’s when tragedy happened. Eventually the mall fell and it was abandoned in a corner where somebody found it and decided to give it new purpose. Lonely, the spirit would wake further curious, concerned where all the people went. 

But that’s where it would make its mistake. Because nobody was coming, not until whoever found it and placed it outside. And once something awakens it’s really hard to put it back to sleep, even if it would be for its own good.