The Trappings of Soft Serve

The day started out ordinary, almost plain, not a whiff of strangeness in the air. Ram and his friend emerged from the Uber and looked down a brown New York alley on a sunny afternoon in the East Village. They walked across the street to the new soft-serve joint they’d come to try.

This place had all the makings of a hidden gem - John only knew it existed because he had walked past it on his way to work. There was no mention of this place on the usual NYC Food TikToks, posts that inevitably drew the crowds to some ill-prepared establishment that struggled to keep quality at pace with demand. No - this was a place that was fresh, new and unencumbered by crowds.

The black and purple color scheme gave the storefront an almost magical feel as they entered. Behind the counter was a single ethnically ambiguous man, his clothes matching the color scheme of the store. Behind him were two flavors of soft serve: Sesame (black) and Ube (purple). Ram and John were alone in this store, seemingly having found this place before anyone else.

As Ram shuffled to the counter, the man at the register pointed to the sign behind him: “Out of soft serve, chocolate available”. Having come this far for soft serve, Ram wasn’t ready to give up: “Do you have other locations?”, he asked. The man nodded and said, “Yeah we have one in the West Village, but they might be out of soft serve too. I can call them to check”. Then began the longest 3 minutes of Ram’s life.

Just as the server picked up the phone, Ram felt everything going dark. The store’s blackout curtains had closed in an instant, plunging the store into an eerie twilight. When Ram’s gaze shifted back at the server, all he saw was a phone falling from the air - the server had vanished.

Looking around for John, all Ram could see were the whites of his eyes. In this dimly lit store, nothing was visible anymore. Instinctively Ram ran out the way they came, only to discover that the the door was burning hot. As he cried out and turned around he caught a glimpse of a purple shadow darting around the room. Paralyzed by fear, Ram watched hopelessly as the purple thing swallowed his friend whole.

With the adrenaline pumping through his veins, Ram’s eyes darted around the room, looking for a hint of an escape. As the purple shadow inched closer to him, he yanked the curtains open - “the creature must despise light”, he thought. For a second, the shadow disappeared and Ram saw the ordinary bustle of New York life outside.

As he paused to catch his breath, the blinds were yanked out of his grasp and closed themselves again. The purple shadow leapt out of the blinds and straight at Ram. There was nothing he could do. As he felt himself becoming more blue, his last thought was “I don’t even like soft serve”.

Having consumed its lunch, the shadow went back into its docile form of the server. The door to the alley swung open again, and in walked the two men - Ram and his friend. Only now, they wore the same black and purple outfit as the previous server, their eyes possessing an otherworldly glint. No one would have guessed that the innocuous soft-serve duo were now one with the entity that had once haunted them.

As they took their positions behind the counter, their eyes scanned the street beyond the glass door. A group of tourists was approaching, their excited chatter filling the alleyway, oblivious to the hidden gem they were about to discover. The friends exchanged a glance, a shared understanding passing between them. Dinner was about to be served, in this black and purple soft-serve shop in the heart of New York.