You’re standing there, looking inside the see through glass of my shop, wondering what kind of things I put on display.

The sign that said ‘Wonders Antique' and others small faded words does not impress you a little bit, but curiosity of what inside has take its hold on you.

You stood there for a few good minutes before you finally decided to walk into the shop.

The bell on top of the door is tingling, and the door is creaking, seems like I forgot to put some oil on the hinge again.

The screeching noise doesn’t seems to bother you too much except for a look you had on your face when the dust particles fallen upon your head when you stepped inside through the door.

You saw me then, sitting on the cashier and you nodded at me, saying that you’re just going to look around the shop in an awkward manner.

I nodded back, not particularly interested, saying some words that a shop owner would said and not moving even an inch from where I’m sitting, looking at you silently as you walked around the display tables and the row of aisles with tall shelves up to the ceiling.

I have a lot of things on display; from petite to gigantic, from lovely to macabre, from normal to unnatural, and you looked curiously at them all. A looks of wonder is shown on your face when you saw the merchandises on the shop. Enchanted by the odd things on the table and some that I hanged on the ceiling with the piano strings. A music box embedded with sparky stones, a necklace made entirely with moose leather and tigers teeth, a colorful mask of some cannibalistic tribe from a lost civilization and other stuff like that.

Then you walked deeper into the aisles where the lighting is not that much brighter, more dustier, a lot colder, and obviously a lot more gloomier, and you has unconsciously slowing down your steps.

Your palms rubbing your arms repeatedly, feeling the cold, but you kept on walking anyway.

There’s not much things I placed on the back but some ordinary looking things.

And then, your eyes spotted it.

Sitting on the corner of the room, laying on an old wooden chair, is a little black dress.

You move closer to the chair, wondering why a little black dress is placed on a chair like that, not on a mannequin or the like, but your simple thinking mind thought that it may be because I simply don’t have a mannequin or a hanger. Moreover, this is the only clothing pieces you’ve saw except for the accessories you’ve seen in the entire shop.

You then inspecting the dress, touching and lifting it carefully for it seems so fragile at first glance, and the more you look at it, the more you found that the dress suit your taste. Even thought it is too short and black is not your favorite color, you have a strange feeling telling you that somehow, the dress is made just for you.

You frowned at the size, however.

For someone who has an overweight problem like you, a dress with that size is out of your league, but a small part of your mind screaming that it want the dress desperately.

In the end, you called for me on the front desk, asking about the price of the little black dress on top of the chair on the back of the room, and when I told you the price, you raised one of your eyebrow at me, thinking that thirty thousand grand for that kind of dress is unacceptable, and the word ‘scammer’ crosses your mind.

It’s not like you don’t have the money, being a former high ranking employee of a big company for years have left you with a lot of money on your bank account when you left them to bankrupt. But after some time, you ended up living as a worker of a certain mediocre company for a reason only you know.

You try to bargain with me for a more ‘reasonable price’, which I refuse, obviously, again and again, not for your price, not for your plea, and in the end, you decide to give up on that dress, very, very unwillingly.

You keep on looking back to the place where the little black dress is supposedly sitting, waiting, and when the sound of the bell is tingling and the old door screeching its miserable cry for the second time that day, you finally left.

Silence finally came for me once again, and after the sky turned black, I flip the plate on the door and shutting down the shop just like every other day.

But I know that you’ll be back tomorrow. I know you would.

And so you came, right after I opened the door the day after, after a sleepless night with the little black dress as the centre of your dream the night before.

You shoved a bag full of money at me, remembering that I do not accepting a payment by card. That was your last savings on your finally over credit bank account. Your face looks anxious, afraid that I would refuse to sell that little black dress to you.

Not saying anything, I place the bag under the counter and take the little black dress from the back and before I had the chance to wrap it up, you demanded to take it home just like that.

You shoved in the little black dress to your bag, rushing outside and running home with the little black dress on your grasp. Your mind is still full of anxiety, afraid that someone would try to steal the little black dress you just bought out of your hand.

The time you took a step on your home, you lock the door and take the little black dress out. You stare at the little black dress on your hands, raising it high under the light, admiring the beauty of the fluttering black cloths for a couple minutes, and the more you look at the little black dress, the lovelier it looks for you.

You stripped to your underwear, wanting to try the little black dress although you initially doesn’t even think that you’ll ever fit in when you see the little black dress yesterday.

The little black dress will always fit though.

Always, no matter what size you are.

You slid into the little black dress, smiling happily onto the mirror, looking at your reflection. You feel beautiful, and you feel that you have become a whole different person by simply wearing that little black dress. What’s more with that confidence bubbling inside of you.

You wear the little black dress all day until you fall asleep, with a very pleasant dream accompanying your sleep, and the feeling lasted all the way to your workplace the day after.

You feel that many peoples on the street gave you the jealous eyes, your friends complimenting you, your co-workers is being nicer to you, and your boss even compliment you on your work today.

You thought that this is the blessings of the little black dress, as the day passed nicely and pleasantly without any incident after you wore the little black dress on your body.

With that belief on your mind, you then proceed to wear the dress every time, not even bothering to take it off, you keep on admiring yourself in the mirror anywhere you went, for hours to come, and days passed, and then weeks flies by, and as time goes, so your pleasant days.

You feel that the once jealous looks of passerby turned to ridicule, and your friends and co-workers even showing they concern for you.

But the looks the peoples gave to you did not falter you a bit. Any words and advice about the dress will set you into a rage. You told then to mind their own business, and your twisted mind have the thought that they’re trying to steal the little black dress for themselves by saying that everything is for your own goodwill.

After times and times you lashed out at them, they starting to backing off, one by one, and stopped trying to speak any sense to you anymore, and you’re perfectly fine with that.

As long as you have the little black dress, everything is perfect for you.

Time passed quickly, by that time, no one even care about you anymore since you have became a mad man in their eyes.

Your boss then decide that things have gotten out of control since you make too much commotion on your workplace because of your weirdness for the other employees to bear, and decide to send you off of the office after failed to send you to a therapist.

You began to shut yourself in then, never getting out from your apartment and living off from whatever you can find on your fridge and cupboards.

This last for a while until one day, you realize that something feels different. You realize that you have became a lot more gaunt, not happy and losing the confidence the little black dress gave you before. You’ve become so thin that the shapes of your bones is visible through the skins, although you have been trying to do some dieting a lot of times before and it always failed.

Your skins has become scaly, dry and cracking, like a dirt that’s been fried under the hot sun. Your hair, which once is a healthy, shining brown hair, now is a tangled, dirty mess and would fallen out of your head whenever you move even so little.

You now have difficulty to mobilize your limbs, and soon you’ll find it difficult to even rise from your couch where you’ve sat for days now.

You finally realize, that maybe your co-workers and friends are right about your condition. About the little black dress.

After a lot of pondering and thinking, you finally decide to take off the dress from your body, but you’re too weak to do so.

Your hands are shaking, your breath is short and quick, you need to take the dress out of your body but you just couldn’t, it’s like the dress is sticking together with your skins. And it feels a lot much more tighter than you ever remember. You thought that it was really strange for the dress to shrink according to your body size like that.

After a few more try, you then given up and with a haggard breath, you grabbed a pair of scissor that laying just atop of the table beside you that you previously use to cut the bags of chips that’s littered on the ground.

You’re weak, but you hold the scissor tightly on your hand, trying to cut the hem of the little black dress from the bottom, where it doesn’t sticking too much with your skins.

You snip, and you scream along with a screeching sounds that coming from your body that’s definitely not you. You feel like a sharp blade is cutting on your skins, and true enough, you saw bloods trickling down to the carpet from your couch that’s too have been soaked with bloods.

You screams again, trying to get up from the couch to run but you could only fall down to the ground.

The screeching noice is still present. Unstoppable. Louder.

You sobs and cry, but the pain and deafening sounds will not stop even if you begs for it.

You don’t know what’s happenings, feeling confused and scared to the bones, with streams of tears gushing out from your eyes, you try to crawls to the door and screaming for help.

Not even an inch you move, the screeching sounds vanished, and you halted on your way when that happen.

A feelings of dread is accompanying you with the silence. You have the feeling that something really horrible is going to happen. Tears ticking down heavily on your pale sunken cheeks, and your lips along with your bony body trembled with fear.

Before you have the time to think about it more, you feel as if you’re very light and floating from the ground, and you did.

You’re paralyzed from fear, unable to move as you rose higher and higher.

As you float motionlessly, you saw some black mist coming out from your body, or more particularly, from what you wore around your body. The mist getting thicker and thicker, heavier, and it’s getting hard to breath through the black haze. They twirl around your body, squeezing your fragile bones little by little, and you feel like your body is drained from any energy, and your voice chords is not even able to form a single sounds afterward.

In your fear infested mind, you regretted a lot of things. You regret not listening to your friends and co-workers words, you regretted ever wearing the little black dress, you regretted wasting away your moneys for an insignificant thing, and as your bones cracking and tearing from your skins by the pressure and bloods spurted out from the teared skins and magically disappear amidst the black mist, the crimson red flesh, blood stained bones and organs visible from the mangled body of yours, you thought of something you regretted the most in your miserable life as the pain blurring your minds and your consciousness is fading is, that you regretted ever stepping inside my old little shop of wonders.

And then quiet fills the room.

There’s no blood to be seen, no body in sight, and no little black dress everywhere in the apartment, just some rotten trash and stinky waste scattered on the floor.

Later the police would conclude that this is just the regular missing person case and the file will be forgotten under the piles of other missing persons after some time has passed.

For the time you have the little black dress, I’ve been idling around on the shop just like the usual. Nothing interesting happened after your purchase, until the time I heard some loud screeching noise from the back of the aisles.

Ah… I see that the little black dress is back at the corner, laying on top of its chair, coming back with all its glory.

Peoples always returned for that piece of black little dress whenever they set their eyes on it. Its just a simple little black dress, really. Black, short dress, and that is. Just a simple little black dress.

I could never figured out what so special about that. But you must have found a charm on that one little black dress, don’t you? Just like the others.

Yes. There’s many, many other womans and girls that got enchanted by that simple little black dress for a long time now.

All of them have that same look upon their face when they set their eyes on the dress too, like you do.

That crazed look on your eyes, those eye bags under from your restless night, your haggard look, your overall pale complexion and your trembling body that’s driven by anxiety, I’ve seen them all before. Too often, to be honest.

Usually they would looked inside my shop, enchanted by the dress, and will do anything to get that pieces of little black dress to be their own.

Well, they do get to make it as their own, or more precisely, became a part of it.

You’re here too, as a part of the dress, I see you squirming on the bottom lines of the dress that has gotten longer than before.

Boy, it took a longer time to eat you than the others since you have a lot more meat than the little black dress ever had before, and I can tell that it is very satisfied.

It has been like that for the last two hundred years, so it’s getting more lively, you see.

So I’ll welcome you to the Wonders Antique, where you’ll found a lot of things of wonder, the items that can make you smile, awe, and scream.

Anyway, you’re squirming again, doesn’t looks that happy like the first time I saw you.

But, you don’t know what would happen when you entered this shop, don’t you? You don’t know.

And now, you know.

The End