The year is 2057.
A mysterious, pale, chubby woman with a turd bun and a hugely receded hairline lives in her decrepit house with a couple of cats. She spends all day peeping out of her rotten windows, from behind the safety of her millennial pink velvet curtains.
The local children are scared of her. They run past her house as quick as they can on their way home, because it gives them the creeps.
There are rumours amongst the children regarding this mysterious lady. Some say she blocked every single person on the internet and now lives entirely alone, haunted by her own nastiness. Others say she collects her own feces in boxes, or that she takes in cats from the street and feeds them tuna until they’re as fat and unhappy as her. The most persistent rumour however, is that of her shelves. They call her the Shelf Lady, because her horrible, rotting house is so covered in shelves that you cannot easily move around it. On every floor, in every room, on every surface, shelves full of mismatched crates tower over the Shelf Lady, mocking her, haunting her. Still, Shelf Lady cannot bare to part with her shelves.
The children whisper amongst themselves about what the shelves could possibly contain. Boxes of poo? Dead cats? One child says his mum told him the shelves contain print outs of every single person on the internet who ever said anything vaguely critical of her. Another child once ran close up to the house for a dare, and said it smelt of blood and fish, and swears the shelves were full of enamel pins and what looked like stickers and drawings by young children. This child is also certain she heard a faint voice tell her to “be kind, I have endew”, but she was so afraid she ran away before she could even get a better look.
The mystery of who Shelf Lady actually is may never be solved, but one thing is for sure: she lives alone, and she will die alone, sneering out from behind her filthy velvet curtains at her rotten windows, with her hair tied back so tight that her forehead seems larger than the moon. Beware the Shelf Lady, the children all say, not because she’s a threat, but because you really don’t want to end up like her.