The fog hit me first.
Right at the entrance to the Halloween store. It spilled out like breath from some machine in the back, curling around my sneakers, catching the mall light like smoke in a school play. It didn’t smell like real fog—not the kind I imagined on moors or graveyards in movies—it smelled… artificial. But in the best way. Plastic and promise. Newness and danger. I breathed it in like a secret.
Mom walked a few steps ahead, her heels clicking against the cement floor. She was wearing lipstick that didn’t quite match the season, and she kept adjusting the strap of her purse like she wasn’t sure she belonged here. I wasn’t sure either.
But I loved it.
The store was freezing. Conditioned air that made your skin dry and your thoughts sharper. Rows of masks lined the walls like heads waiting for bodies. Some were too scary—bloody mouths, twisted clown faces, empty eye holes that seemed to blink if you looked too long. Others were goofy, cheap. Not for me. I never wanted to be something easy.
I dragged my fingers along a rack of capes. They made that soft, whooshy sound—like the whisper of ghosts brushing past. I imagined myself wearing one, not as a vampire or a witch, but as something unnameable. A girl who moved like fog and remembered too much.
There were rubber spiders in bins. Plastic knives with fake blood inside. Sour apple bubblegum at the register. I took one when Mom wasn’t looking and popped it into my mouth—too sweet, then sharp, like something from another planet. I loved it anyway.
Somewhere in the store, a looping scream track played—low moans and cartoonish shrieks. It should’ve made me laugh, but it didn’t. It made my skin prickle in a way I didn’t have words for yet.
We didn’t buy anything. Mom said we’d come back later, but I knew we wouldn’t.
That was okay.
I didn’t need a costume.
I was already something in-between.
Not quite the kids who ran through the aisles pretending to stab each other. Not quite the moms picking princess dresses and pumpkin hats for toddlers. I was eleven, almost twelve. Too old for some things, too young for others. Serbian at home, American at school. Ghost in both.
I walked out of the store slower than I’d walked in, chewing my gum until the flavor faded. I tried to memorize everything: the way the air smelled, the cold floors, the dimness inside the bright mall. I told myself I’d remember it all.
And I did.
That fog still lives somewhere in my ribs.
That girl too—
the one who didn’t belong anywhere
except here,
in this moment,
haunted and whole.
I trail behind my mom, the cuffs of my too-long jeans dragging across the cement floor, damp from someone’s careless footprints. Everything in here smells the same way memory does—vague, artificial, oddly sweet. A sour apple gumball in my mouth is starting to go bitter. I don’t spit it out. I like the way it turns on me.
She’s already a few steps ahead, tugging a polyester witch’s cape off the rack with a kind of hopeful roughness.
“You’d look good in this,” she says, not turning around.
I don’t answer. I’m eyeing the display of latex masks with slits for eyes and mouths that gape like they’re trying to say something but never will. I run my hand along their rubbery edges, all cold and powdery, their chemical skins hanging like shed faces.
There’s a mirror in the back corner—cheap, cracked along the side—and I catch myself in it. Not the me from school, not the me who doesn’t speak Serbian well enough or smile enough or try hard enough. Just this blurred reflection under flickering fluorescent lights. It feels… closer to something real.
Outside the store, people are walking by. But in here, time doesn’t work right. It stretches and folds and curls like the fog machine haze that clings to the ankles of every costumed mannequin.
My mom comes back with a plastic scythe, grinning.
“Maybe something spooky?” she offers, trying.
I nod. Not because I want it, but because I want her to feel like I belong here. Like I can be someone. Anyone.
We don’t buy anything. Not that night.
But I dream of it later—of being wrapped in a cloak that doesn’t itch, of wearing a mask that fits just right. In the dream, I’m walking the mall alone, glowing faintly, my breath smelling like fog machine smoke and sour candy. And everyone who sees me knows I’m not pretending.
They know I’m real.
Sometimes I think that store only existed for me.
I’ve walked the same stretch of mall in later years—past the nail salon, the sad carousel with chipped paint and motionless horses, the kiosk that sells phone cases and bad cologne—but the Halloween store was never there again. Not like that. Not with that same strange, sacred hum.
I wonder if it was just a pocket in time. Or maybe a pocket in me.
That fall, I started saving little pieces of things. Candy wrappers. Tags from costumes I never owned. A strand of silver tinsel from a witch wig that I’d brushed my fingers through but didn’t buy. I pressed them flat inside a shoebox under my bed like relics. Like proof.
Sometimes, late at night, I’d open it just to smell the gum again, even when it had long since lost its scent. I’d imagine I was back there, standing in that cold air, fog at my feet, the mall world blurred beyond the threshold. I didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of everything.
The beginning of me watching the edges of things more closely. The way light bent. The way people lied with their smiles. The way something cheap could still feel sacred if you gave it meaning.
I never told my mom about the dreams. I don’t think she would’ve understood. She was still trying to make things solid, safe—get us anchored in this American life. Bills, groceries, school meetings, Good Housekeeping magazines. There wasn’t room for fog in her world. No time for hauntings.
But I kept mine.
And I still do.
Because that girl—the one with fog in her lungs and a sour apple gumball on her tongue—she never left.
She just grew quieter. Cleverer. A little better at passing.
But I see her sometimes in store windows. In a cracked mirror. In the way October feels when it’s just starting to tip into cold. She’s always there, waiting.
Still in-between.
Still becoming.
It’s late October again. Different mall. Different me.
The pop-up Halloween store is in a gutted old Staples now—you can still see the outline of the red letters where the sign used to be. Inside, it’s brighter, louder, worse. Everything smells more like rubber and less like memory. But I walk in anyway, hands in my coat pockets, eyes scanning the walls like they might recognize me.
There’s no fog machine at the front. Just blinking LED lights and a motion-sensor zombie that lurches when a kid gets too close. A teenager working the register is dressed like a sexy vampire and looks like she’d rather be anywhere else. She doesn’t look up when I enter.
The masks are still here, though. Cruder somehow. Glossier. I trace the edge of one, fingertips brushing synthetic skin. It doesn’t whisper like it used to. But I pretend it does.
I’m older now. Too old to be here alone, probably. No kid with me, no reason to linger. But something pulls. It always does.
I walk to the back, where the lighting’s worse. Where the floor tiles are cracked. There’s a mirror there too—newer, but the same kind of betrayal. It shows me the face I wear now: more tired, more shaped, more sure. But I still see her—the girl I used to be—hiding just behind my shoulder.
I look down at my hands. They’re the same hands, just longer. I flex them and remember the feel of cheap cloaks and stolen gum and my mom’s hopeful voice saying “Maybe something spooky?”
I never wore the mask. I never bought the cloak. I never picked a side.
Instead, I became the kind of adult who walks into Halloween stores alone, not looking for anything in particular—just trying to remember something that might not even be real.
The girl who didn’t belong anywhere?
She became a woman who belongs a little bit everywhere. Just enough to smile and nod and leave when it gets too loud. Who can vanish into any crowd, but never quite disappear.
Before I leave, I buy a bag of sour apple gum at the register. The kind that loses its flavor fast. I chew one on the way out.
It still turns on me.
And I still love it anyway.
Outside, the wind has teeth. It bites through my coat, pulls at the plastic shopping bag in my hand like it wants to carry it off somewhere.
The parking lot is mostly empty. Just a few cars sitting under the orange hum of lights that don’t flicker, but should. I’m walking slow, unbothered. I like this kind of quiet. The kind that sounds like the world holding its breath.
As I pass a darkened storefront, something shifts.
A movement—quick, peripheral. Not quite a figure, not quite a shadow. Just… the suggestion of someone. Small. The shape of a girl, maybe. Standing still beside a dusty “For Lease” sign.
I turn, fast.
No one’s there.
But the fog rolls out anyway.
Just a breath of it—like the machine from ‘97 finally exhaled one last time. It curls low around my shoes, smelling unmistakably of bubblegum and dust and the memory of wanting. It shouldn’t be there.
And then it’s gone.
Just the wind again. Just me again.
But I’m smiling now. Not the sad kind. Not the polite kind. The kind that knows something.
I open the gum and pop another piece in my mouth. Sour. Sharp.
It turns bitter.
And this time, it tastes exactly right.
Milanka Sulejic grew up in Cudahy, Wisconsin, the daughter of parents from the former Yugoslavia, where storytelling—and a touch of mischief—runs in the family. A military veteran who can handle just about anything (except maybe a foggy Halloween store), she transforms everyday moments into stories that sparkle with magic and memory. Her words have danced across the pages of Phantom Flash Fiction, Sundial Magazine, and Written Tales Magazine, proving that even the smallest slice of life can hide a world of wonder. When she’s not writing, she’s probably sneaking sour apple bubblegum, chasing fog, or imagining what ordinary objects would say if they could talk.
Published 10/30/25