The Lil Critter Shack

Odd, unsettling, underground little place. My father and I were bored one day, walking the strip together and came across this pet store from a Rob Zombie flick.
I’m not saying it’s indecent or ill-​stocked or ill-​serviced, just a little strange is all. A LOT strange, with everything that happened in the ten minutes we were in there.
Once inside, the pet store seems very smalled — only a small room made even smaller by the thousands of glass cages stacked on top of each other and other clutter. A very tattooed and silent clerk sat motionless behind the counter watching us poke around.
They had a large collection of bugs up front — not the first usual offerings of a corner pet store, and they were thousands of them crawling over each other in glass cages WITHOUT LIDS! I was amazed they weren’t spilling out onto the floors, but they really weren’t! Maybe it was in their diet, but they were listless little bugs.
About to leave, I noticed a sign pointing to a long hallway sloped down into stairs leading to a dank concrete basement. The staircase led us to a few small winding rooms containing rats and snakes and spiders and besides these ‘lil’critters’ we weren’t alone — a blond older woman was darting every which way throughout the rooms, feeding and rearranging and cleaning the dusty space like she had just drank three red bulls. She flitted around like crazy while my dad and I just tried to keep out of her way and not knock over any cages or run into the unbridled spider’s web.
Turning the corner into the last room, we were met by a huge yellow boa constrictor separated from us only by a thin window — it was incredible, HUGE, and probably trying to restrain itself from lurching through the glass as it became increasingly aware of our presence staring at it, inching closer and closer towards us.
We had seen enough and leaving had felt as though we had just experienced an impromptu scare house, reminiscent of Halloween. I love to be freaked out by things and hope to visit sometime again soon this October.