Tim carefully squeezed himself through the narrow hallway, searching for the door he'd been directed to. The fluorescent lights above him flickered, making the yellow stains on the blank white walls seem even deeper than they were. He soon found what he was looking for, a sign that read "HUMAN RESOURCES" in plain letters on an otherwise unremarkable door. Hoping that this department wouldn't be as restrictive as the name made them sound, he pushed the door open to find a small office that was completely empty. Well, it was still ten minutes before the appointed time. He would just have to stand here and wait.
A part of him, still, could hardly believe he was doing this. When he'd first told Mindy that he had a job interview lined up, she had reacted the same way. "Don't you already have a job?", she had said to him, raising a dark green eyebrow. Yes, of course he normally had a job, but he couldn't exactly go back into the office anytime soon, even if he could work a computer well enough to fill out a spreadsheet. Plus, someone might point out that he was supposed to return that tree costume when he was done with it. Thankfully, he'd already been told that he could have his job back as soon as he was human again, and he was getting unemployment checks to cover his rent in the meantime.
But just because he was on an extended furlough, that didn't mean he had to stay locked up in his apartment for a month. He'd done that already, and it was incredibly depressing. He needed to find some excuse to not let it happen again. So when he saw that the local mall was hiring temporary greeters for the holiday season, it felt like the perfect opportunity for Tim in more ways than one. And the more he thought about it as he filled in that online application, the more confident he felt about it. Maybe it was more than just luck? Maybe all of this magic stuff had come into his life to guide him here, to force him out of the corporate rat race and make him realize there was more to life than the soulless 9-to-5.
Tim had explained all of this to Mindy, but she was more than a little skeptical. And she was particularly surprised to learn that the job interview he'd signed up for was not going to be held over Zoom. "How exactly are you supposed to get over there?", she'd asked. "It'll take you hours to walk that far, and there's no sidewalks out there anyway."
Answering that question turned out to be even more embarrassing for Tim than revealing he wanted to be decorated had been. And it had taken more than a little convincing to get Mindy to go along with the plan he had in mind. But, realizing that there was no good alternative, she eventually agreed to strap him to the roof of her car and drive him over. The experience was exhilarating for Tim - the wind whipping through his branches, rustling even the ones buried deep down inside that he'd never felt before - but it was obviously nerve-wracking for Mindy. "I can't do this every morning for you," she said to him as she removed the straps and carried him down onto the asphalt. "So if they can't provide you with some sort of transportation, don't take the job." He made a non-committal "mm-hmm" in response and then shuffled his way across the parking lot.
On his slow journey over to the automatic doors and through to the mall concourse, Tim was fully expecting to be mobbed by a bunch of starry-eyed kids and their families as he hunted for the back office where he was supposed to go. The thought made him more than a little anxious, but he was also kind of looking forward to it. He was surprised to find that the whole place was empty. In the couple of minutes that it took him to get to the barely-noticeable door that had led him into that dingy back hallway, he didn't come across a single person. This was the sort of seclusion he would have appreciated once, it occurred to him, but now it felt so much sadder. Then again, it was only a Sunday morning. Maybe everybody was still at church?, he mused.
All these experiences were still fresh in his mind as he stood there, waiting for the sound of footsteps. And soon enough, they came. A man in a wrinkled suit burst through the door next to Tim, fussing with a sheaf of papers in his hands. "Let me see here...", he muttered under his breath. "Three more interviews before I can go on lunch break... Next up, I've got, ah..." He looked down and squinted at one of the sheets he was holding. "Timothy Baumgartner?"
"That's me!", Tim interjected in the most polite tone he could muster.
The man practically jumped out of his skin and dropped the papers he was holding, which collapsed into a jumbled pile around his worn leather shoes. Clearly he had been thinking he was alone in the room. He looked up from the mess at his feet, his eyes searching for the source of the voice. It took a few seconds before his gaze locked onto Tim and the realization dawned on him. "Oh!", he shouted, in a higher pitch than before, then quickly moved to clear his throat. "Excuse me. I wasn't aware that you were, uh..."
"I wanted to say something ahead of time," Tim replied, "but I wasn't sure how to mention it on the application."
The man's previous fear had by now softened into mild annoyance. "I guess we probably have to update those forms now," he said, rolling his eyes, and then stooped down to collect the papers he had dropped. He stepped over to the desk in the corner of the room and started pulling out the chair behind it. "Take a seat," he said, then stopped what he was doing and looked up again. "Or, uh, I mean... can you, uh...?"
"I can't, really." Tim would have shrugged if he still had shoulders. "I don't bend anymore. I've been completely vertical for the past month. But don't worry about me. My feet don't get tired from standing all day, anyway."
The interviewer still looked like he was sucking on a lemon, but he nodded as he sat himself down, eventually pulling the paper he needed out of a stack that was all shuffled together. "Well, I have to be honest, this isn't a situation we've dealt with before here at Southside Mall. I know that, legally speaking, I'm not allowed to discriminate against applicants because of a disability..."
Tim hadn't even considered it that way. His transformation wasn't going to stop him in any way from working as a mall greeter. In fact, it was the only thing that made him even think about taking the job in the first place. He jumped in, realizing a second too late that he was cutting the interviewer off mid-sentence. "Thank you, sir. I guess I should explain why exactly I'm here. I haven't been able to work since Halloween, and, well, as luck would have it, my restoration appointment isn't until January. But I wouldn't consider my current... condition to be a disability, sir. I came here because I think it'll give me the perfect opportunity to entertain the crowds and-"
"Crowds?" The man's eyebrows, already raised, somehow went even higher, pushing up into his balding forehead. "Mr. Baumgartner, did you see any crowds on your way in here?"
Tim was thrown off by that comment and stammered out a response. "W-well, no, but I-I thought that maybe..."
"This is shaping up to be the worst holiday season we've ever had here, you know. I mean, it's not like we were doing great business before all this magic curse stuff got out there, what with people buying all their stuff online. But we still had plenty of seniors coming out here every day, and now they're nowhere to be found. And I won't dance around it. It's all because of you." The man realized he had put a little too much vitriol in that last word and backed up in his seat. "Well, not you personally. I mean all of you people. We've got folks who are afraid to leave their houses because they think they might be next. That it might be... contagious somehow. Or they just want to stay glued to reruns on TV and pretend the world outside isn't changing."
He sighed, looking weary as he went on. "That's what we're really up against here at Southside Mall. That's why we're hiring holiday greeters, to try to make people feel welcome here. To make this place feel like a home away from home, a safe harbor in a world that's full of storms. So let me stop this interview right now. I can't hire you. I'm sure you're a perfectly nice person underneath all that... stuff, but you'd scare away our customers the moment you said anything to them."
Tim felt numb as he listened to that whole spiel. He had imagined, going in, that this interview would be a piece of cake - that he'd charm whoever he needed to impress with his magic-addled spirit, just like he had done on that street corner last week. He wanted to argue with the man that it didn't have to be this way, that right now was exactly the time to show the world that changed people were still people. But the tone of the interviewer's voice made it clear that his mind was already made up. He seemed to have thought a lot about this - maybe he had nothing else to do, sitting alone in this empty building all day.
The only rebuttal Tim could come up with felt lame as it came out of his mouth. "I thought you said you couldn't discriminate against people with a disability."
The interviewer smirked a little bit. "I thought you said it wasn't really a disability." Then his face fell back into its much more serious position. "But you didn't let me finish my sentence earlier. I'm not allowed to discriminate if there's a disability, unless that disability clearly makes it impossible for you to do the job. And, well, you clearly can't do the job of bringing shoppers back in the middle of this magical recession, so there's nothing stopping me from rejecting your application immediately." He crumpled up the sheet of paper he was holding and tossed it into a nearby wastebasket. "We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors. And, of course, happy holidays."
Tim was nearly burning with anger, determined to prove everything this man was saying wrong. But he knew he wasn't going to get anywhere with him now. "Do you think I might have a better chance applying at Northtown Mall, then?"
"Okay, now you have to get out of my office," said the man, getting up from his chair and looking about ready to push Tim out the door. "However it is that you move. We don't say the N word around here."