I Work at a Family Entertainment Centre, and I’m Pretty Sure the Ball-Pit Is Bottomless

I mean, I’ve worked at this place for as long as I remember and it’s pretty weird and even harder to describe. It’s your usual family-fun indoor park I guess. There’s a million of them all over the place and they all have different names. We have a shitty little café that over charges for stale hotdogs and then a butt-load of warehouse space filled with random crap to keep kids entertained. There’s a jungle gym, an arcade with ancient games, a greasy bowling alley, and obviously there’s a ball-pit.

Honestly, it’s a pretty cool job although it has taught me that kids, in general, are super weird. I remember this one time a random kid came up to me and handed me some marbles and then just started laughing. It took me a few minutes to get it out of him, but he told that he’d shoved the marbles up his butt, and now I was touching his butt marbles. And he just thought it was the funniest God damned thing anyone has ever done.

Ever.

We have a high turnover rate, that’s for sure. We chew through new employees like popcorn and I think it’s because kids have this weird ability to home in on anyone they make uncomfortable and just thrive off the awkwardness. At least teachers and parents get to deal with one set of kids, right? They get to know them over time, and sure those kids will occasionally explode or have prolonged periods of begin crazy high energy, but for the most part, the parents and teachers are there to manage the kids.

But that’s the exact opposite of what we do. We’re here to manage the centre, not the kids. Every kid here is meant to blow off steam, that’s why parents bring them here. It’s why they pay the entry fee. We can’t make these kids sit down or write lines. We can’t threaten or goad or shout. What we have is a revolving door of kids who are permanently psyched out, and we’re just meant to keep them occupied long enough for their parents to smoke a joint around the back or cry in the toilets where no one can see them break down.

I gotta say, it’s tough. I only stuck it out because I’m in management and that means my job is to get a bunch of teenagers to do all the dirty work. It’s like a pyramid scheme but grosser. Nobody at Enron had to brush vomit out of a crying 9-year-old’s hair. Still, I limit my exposure to the kids and for a damn good reason.

They scare the shit out of me.

For one thing, there’s always the wrong number. This place is always full no matter how many tickets we sell. Most people don’t even stay here long enough to notice but I have. I’ve spent a few years now counting tickets and then heads and I know for a fact that there are rainy days in the middle of coldest winters when we sell, ten, maybe twenty, tickets at most. But no matter what, the floor is crawling with kids.

Another thing, kids go into the ball pit and don’t come out. Nobody complains, nobody’s reported missing. But I know for a fact that not only do some kids never come back out, but some kids that do come out never went in in the first place. I already know what you’re thinking, that I’m nuts. But I once trialled a photo-day just to confirm my suspicions. I took pics of the kids and parents coming and going (I said it was for a competition) and I swear to God, I have dozens of photos of parents coming in with one kid and leaving with a totally different one.

I’ve thought about trying to empty the ball-pit out to see if there’s anywhere they could go, like a tunnel I never knew about. I did try to empty it once. It was years ago and I wanted to clean it properly, so I waited until after hours and started scooping balls out and dumping them into empty bins but after a while I got scared and stopped. Something about the experience just freaked me out. It was like the more balls I pulled out, the quieter everything got, like the whole place started to anticipate something. All those weird cartoon characters painted onto the wall with freaky eyes that follow you around the room, the zombie-shooter arcade machines that make those stupid fake ghoul noises, the twisty airplane rocket that rocks kids back and forth while blasting obnoxious music… it all kinda faded out. It was like the whole place held its breath. And my head started to throb like the world’s worst hangover, and my mouth started tasting all coppery and it made me wanna retch.

It freaked me out, and I stopped and just tipped the balls back in. As soon as I did the pressure in my head released and the place was full of noise again, like nothing had even changed.

Now I just clean the ball pit out with one of those nets they use for swimming pools. There’s always the weirdest stuff in there: dead mice, crushed insects, dog shit, random goo, and what I can only describe as a series of gifts or messed up experiments. I don’t know where they come from, but a week hasn’t gone past where I haven’t had to fish some half-dead, tortured animal out of the depths of that pit. If I’m lucky, the animal dies as soon as I pull it out, but I keep a spare pillow case around here just in case. I don’t how humane it is to be stuffed into a sack and smashed against an alley wall, but I know it has to be more humane than keeping them alive.

I used to think the kids dragged roadkill in there but after I started paying a little more attention, I noticed things like badly sutured wounds stitched together with random thread, or even half-healed amputations. I don’t think it’s even possible for a kid to pull off a successful trepanning on a squirrel and keep the thing alive, half-paralysed, at the bottom of a ball-pit. It just doesn’t make sense. But I keep finding them, half stuffed with bugs, eyelids cut off… Jesus Christ, the worst one didn’t even have any cuts.

I still don’t know who did it or how. I don’t know how the ball got inside the rat. It was alive, with no scars or open wounds, but it was like it had swallowed a whole damn ball. It wasn’t crying or making any noise. It was just shivering, alive and in shock at what had happened to it. The pain must have been overwhelming, all of its organs crushed, its bones pushed out of sockets… Just looking at it made me wanna hurl. It was the most unnatural thing I’ve ever seen.

It’s just another reason why I couldn’t ask anyone else to do this job. I think most people come and go so quickly, they never realise just how weird it is. I’d rather no one start asking questions. I think if I was braver I’d try to dig a little deeper and I’d encourage others to help me, but no one else has seen the weirdness up-close like I have and I guess my conclusion is this: if we don’t know what’s down there, why bother it?

It’s clearly best to just leave it alone.

That’s why I’m glad we have a high turnover rate. People get super weird if they stick around too long. I’ve moved a few people on because they started to go a bit loopy. First, we see paranoia setting in. They start looking at you funny, or the kids. I mean, the kids I get, but me? What’s wrong with me. Second, we see them starting to fixate on the ball-pit. People who stay too long obsess over it. When you’re not looking, they’ll sneak over and try to jam a broom stick into the bottom. When they can’t find it they’ll start freaking out, talking about foundations and floor plans. Finally, the worst ones will start trying to go over my head to speak to corporate. They go nuts, asking questions and ringing numbers and just bugging me over and over. If you’re not careful, they can actually become quite threatening. I know you wouldn’t think it, but people get really wound up about this kind of stuff.

One girl I had to call the cops on. She developed a real unhealthy interest in me. She even asked me where I lived! She wanted to know where I slept and ate and who my parents were. Even after I fired her she kept coming back, even tried to burn the place down. I think this place messes with people’s minds because she started talking about how the number to HQ just went to my office, my driver’s license was fake, my clothes had someone else’s name sewed into them, where did I even go at night, where did I sleep, where was my car? She even revealed that one night she’d camped outside the building and waited for me like some God damned stalker! When I confronted her about it, she had no defence. She was completely gone over the edge talking about how the old manager went missing years ago and I was wearing his uniform and no one had ever seen me outside the centre.

I’m glad she’s gone now because she made me really uncomfortable with that paranoid rambling. I still don’t know what she was implying. Honestly, just listening to her gave me a really bad headache with the coppery taste.

I still wonder what happened to her. But she’s a good example of why we should just leave this thing alone because, sure enough, the next week I found myself fishing one of her shoes out of the ball-pit. I think what was weirdest about that was that it wasn’t covered in blood, or anything like that. It just had a small note asking me, personally, for help.

She was so troubled. I tried to tell her to stop, tried to give her some clue. When I’d fired her, just before the stalking started, she had started asking me all these questions about how long I’d been working here and whether I’d seen the bottom of the ball-pit and I kept trying to telling her,

“I’ve been here for as long as I can remember, and I’m pretty sure the ball-pit is bottomless.”

Well, now she can be sure about it too.