Twelve Pallets

So once our store had to accept twelve pallets. Twelve pallets. That’s six more then we’re supposed to hold. Four more then what’s safe. And what was more was it was only JJ and I to do it! We spent hours hauling boxes into the backroom and stacking them up as high as we could. Imagine us taking that big ladder, standing on that unsafe top step, and placing another box onto the tower. That’s how bad it was. Just boxes of Lego stacked a hundred feet in the air. The shelves were sagging from the wight they were so full, and everything else was against the wall. Double stacked even. You know how Ronald is a small normal sized human? He wouldn’t have been able to reach the back we had so much stacked up against the wall. Thankfully me and JJ were skinny enough to get back there.

Now you’d think with so much back there things would get buried and we couldn’t stock, and you’d be right. It was ridiculous. Anyways I remember trying to find something back there and squeezing past a tower of boxes to get to the aisle. Except I hit it. A corner snagged against my body and I felt behind me the wight of it all shift.

I knew right then I was going to die.

I cried out and ducked down, covered my head, and hoped to God he’d save me. I heard everything stacked behind crumble. I felt it fall, but I waited a moment, and then another one, and when I realized, I wasn’t buried looked behind me to see what had happened.

JJ, the man and the legend, had spread his spidery arms as far as he could to hold the falling boxes back. He had somehow managed to hold the falling tower with his back. One arm stabilized it, the other braced himself against the shelf on my other side. He stood straining beneath the weight. He looked down at me.

“Are you alright?”

“Y-yeah. Thank you”

“Move. Go CJ. I can’t hold these boxes back forever.”

I scuffed as fast as I could beneath him towards the exit.

“I won’t ever forget you.”

“I’m not done yet. Hhhrrrruuunnggg!”

And JJ showed me a feat of straight I’ve never seen since that day. He pushed the boxes back, knocking them into others, which in turn fell his way. With his other hand he stopped them. His legs buckled under the weight, and with a shot he lifted them back against the wall.

Only JJ had pushed too hard. In trying to save himself he had slammed the towers into the wall, and the old built-back-in-the-fifties architecture couldn’t take it! The wall collapsed! And with it went the towers of sets. All of it fell onto the sales floor and crashed into the support beam! A crack the size of Texas appeared, and every soul in the mall booked it to an exit.

As I ran the entire mall began to rumble. JJ had started a domino effect, and I had only just cleared the door with both stories of the mall collapsed to the ground behind me.

“JJ!” I shouted. “Did he make it out? Did anyone see JJ leave?”

“No!” said my coworkers. “He must still be in there!”

We all immediately ran to the rubble and began to clear it. But we couldn’t shift through the entire mall by ourselves. We couldn’t even get close to the store. It took days for a clean up crew to unbury our store, but when they did they still couldn’t find JJ.

Eventually a new mall and a new Lego store were built. But JJ’s body was never found.

Sometimes, at night, we think we still hear him. If you listen carefully in the back room. I tell you the honest truth. I’ve heard him.

“The people who send shipment is dumb.”

And that’s JJ for you. The myth, the man, and the legend.