Bill worked in Accounting. Bill had always worked in Accounting; no one at GiantCorp could remember a time when he hadn't, somehow. Bill was a model of efficiency: any email sent to Bill between the hours of 8 am and 5 pm would be answered within 15 minutes (even during lunch), any action item assigned to Bill in a meeting would be completed impeccably well ahead of the imposed deadline, and any file left in Bill's inbox would appear, almost as if by magic, in his outbox or filing cabinet, with every "i" dotted and every "t" crossed.
One morning, as he stuck his head into Bill's office to say "hi" (as he had every morning for at least 8 years), Tom stopped dead in his tracks. It was 8:17 am, Bill's desk was empty, and the light in his office had not been turned on. Tom took a tentative step into the office, subconsciously torn between being unable to believe that Bill was in the office and unable to believe that he wasn't, and said (in a half-whisper that surprised even him with the raw fear that pervaded it), "Bill?"
There was no answer, but as Tom took another step into the office, he was struck by a wave of intense cold such as nothing he had ever experienced. Every hair on his arms and neck immediately stood straight up, and he felt goosebumps run the length of his arms and legs. This cold was the cold of the grave, the cold of planes crashed in the Alps, the cold of camps set up by early explorers on their way to the North Pole who had abandoned them, never been seen again.
Without quite knowing why, Tom repeated (a little more loudly), "Bill?", and as he did so he felt the cold probing his mind, as if it almost understood him but could not quite piece together what he meant by whatever he had said. Tom took one step backward, instinctively, and he immediately felt the cold withdraw and retreat (if that were possible) to the area behind the desk.
Tom left the office in a state of complete mental gridlock. He couldn't tell anyone about what he'd just experienced, but he couldn't bring any other single thing about his normal workday into his mind to displace it. He sat at his desk until lunch time, missing one staff meeting and making absolutely no progress on the deliverables he owed to his boss's boss by COB.
As he made his way to the employee cafeteria, he noticed a sibilant hush that pervaded all the hallways and stairwells. He overheard snatches of conversation as he passed groups of 2 or 3 people walking closely bunched, all wide-eyed and almost giddy with disbelief, and all with one name on their lips: Bill. Bill wasn't here, Bill had called in sick for the first time ever, Bill had secretly been stealing from the company for years and was in Aruba by now, Bill had passed away last night quietly in his bed from pancreatic cancer. Stories about Bill were ubiquitous and completely disparate; the only common element they contained was that Bill was not at work today.
8.22.2008
Late August short story
He was a short man (he would grant anyone that) but he would die before he would admit to any of the symptoms of “short man’s syndrome”, that most annoying of afflictions which (he had always been informed by others) likely meant that he was a confrontational asshat.
So he proceeded through his days counting to ten before replying when he was annoyed or angry, purposefully adopting non-confrontational postures when interacting with tall men and women, and generally maintaining a vigilant watch over his own character and actions in order to stockpile the necesssary evidence with which he could defend himself from any such charge that he might, at some point, hypothetically face.
She was a woman generally described by those who knew her best as “striking” rather than “beautiful”; a woman who found that once she had achieved her late twenties, everyone she met somehow assumed that she was married even though she wore a simple ring with a piece of amber in it on the ring finger of her left hand.
She amused herself for hours sitting in bars that catered mostly to men who actually had a sense of right and wrong, watching different guys struggle internally all night, their desire to approach her stalemated by their inexplicable conviction that she was already married.
He met her in line at the supermarket, struck by her beauty and emboldened by her unique ring. “That’s quite a lovely bit of amber you have there,” he offered up, fortuitously just as she was turning her head slightly toward him to read a particular tabloid headline.
“Thanks, I’ve had it forever...are you a collector?”
“No, but I have seen Jurassic Park at least three times, although only once was of my own volition...that scene with the kid surviving the jolt from the electric fence makes me break out in hives.”
She was smiling as she loaded groceries onto the back end of the check-out conveyor belt, and glanced back as he finished his facetious remarks; she was half-surprised and wholly impressed to see that his eyes were meeting hers and not sliding greasily around her body as she stretched and leaned to pick things from the bottom of the cart.
“You shouldn’t watch the second one then...and definitely not the third one,” she replied, continuing to meet his gaze as all her groceries were slowly processed, bagged and re-carted. He was a little short for her, she thought, but there was something in his manner that made her decide, in that moment, to give him a chance.
“I’ll tell you what...give me your number and I’ll call you when I rent them, and you can tell me when the horrendously stupid parts are coming up, and I’ll...cover my eyes or something.”
She flicked a business card out of her wallet as she replaced her debit card, flipped it over smoothly and wrote her cell phone number on the back with the pen chained to the ATM pad. “I’ll tell you what...call me before you rent a movie, and I’ll help you pick out one that’s worth watching, how about that?”
“It’s a deal,” he said, and as he watched her push her freshly bagged food toward the exit he felt a little lighter, as if the process of vigilant watchfulness and effort had left him a finished personality that he could relax into now, not waiting anymore for accusations of being any certain way, but just being himself.
It felt good...it felt very good.
So he proceeded through his days counting to ten before replying when he was annoyed or angry, purposefully adopting non-confrontational postures when interacting with tall men and women, and generally maintaining a vigilant watch over his own character and actions in order to stockpile the necesssary evidence with which he could defend himself from any such charge that he might, at some point, hypothetically face.
She was a woman generally described by those who knew her best as “striking” rather than “beautiful”; a woman who found that once she had achieved her late twenties, everyone she met somehow assumed that she was married even though she wore a simple ring with a piece of amber in it on the ring finger of her left hand.
She amused herself for hours sitting in bars that catered mostly to men who actually had a sense of right and wrong, watching different guys struggle internally all night, their desire to approach her stalemated by their inexplicable conviction that she was already married.
He met her in line at the supermarket, struck by her beauty and emboldened by her unique ring. “That’s quite a lovely bit of amber you have there,” he offered up, fortuitously just as she was turning her head slightly toward him to read a particular tabloid headline.
“Thanks, I’ve had it forever...are you a collector?”
“No, but I have seen Jurassic Park at least three times, although only once was of my own volition...that scene with the kid surviving the jolt from the electric fence makes me break out in hives.”
She was smiling as she loaded groceries onto the back end of the check-out conveyor belt, and glanced back as he finished his facetious remarks; she was half-surprised and wholly impressed to see that his eyes were meeting hers and not sliding greasily around her body as she stretched and leaned to pick things from the bottom of the cart.
“You shouldn’t watch the second one then...and definitely not the third one,” she replied, continuing to meet his gaze as all her groceries were slowly processed, bagged and re-carted. He was a little short for her, she thought, but there was something in his manner that made her decide, in that moment, to give him a chance.
“I’ll tell you what...give me your number and I’ll call you when I rent them, and you can tell me when the horrendously stupid parts are coming up, and I’ll...cover my eyes or something.”
She flicked a business card out of her wallet as she replaced her debit card, flipped it over smoothly and wrote her cell phone number on the back with the pen chained to the ATM pad. “I’ll tell you what...call me before you rent a movie, and I’ll help you pick out one that’s worth watching, how about that?”
“It’s a deal,” he said, and as he watched her push her freshly bagged food toward the exit he felt a little lighter, as if the process of vigilant watchfulness and effort had left him a finished personality that he could relax into now, not waiting anymore for accusations of being any certain way, but just being himself.
It felt good...it felt very good.
8.11.2008
poetry corner
I am the dying ember of a fire that was born banked
already hidden and glowing before it was sparked
left overnight to bridge the daylight hours
never alive, never a thing itself
only a pale reflection of what came before
and will never come after
already hidden and glowing before it was sparked
left overnight to bridge the daylight hours
never alive, never a thing itself
only a pale reflection of what came before
and will never come after
8.06.2008
Another August story
“Lemme tell you…Dave was the kind of guy that would call you up on Thursday night, all, ‘Hey man, let’s go downtown and get some beers, maybe meet some girls, it’ll be chill, man, c’mon,’ and then it would take about 45 minutes to figure out what place we were supposed to be going to, and then you’d get over to his place and he still wouldn’t be ready, and by the time he finished all his showering and hair care and all that stuff it’d be, like, one o’clock, and everybody would have crashed out playing Nintendo or something.”
Hunter was the kind of guy who liked to exaggerate his stories, sometimes creating entire personalities for people from his past out of a few tiny fragments of behavior. This little diatribe about Dave had sprung from the events of a single night, when he had arrived at Dave’s while the aforementioned showering and primping had been in progress and had amused himself by doing shots of Rumpelmintz until he had passed out on the couch, vaguely aware that Dave had tried to rouse him at one point but remembering that he had been completely unable to respond in any coherent way. He had awakened the next morning nestled in the couch, with the unmistakable sour smell of vomit now emanating from under the cushion he was using as a pillow.
He didn’t tell Dave about the puke, either; that’s also the kind of guy that Hunter was. But he was pretty harmless; not the kind of buddy that you’d call if you REALLY needed help, but the kind that you just sort of left in your E-vite distribution list because it seemed kind of wrong when you thought about taking him out.
So Hunter just kind of slid through the world as an adult; found a pretty good job, got married a time or two, had some kids, moved around the country a little bit, all the standard stuff. But THEN, on one very magical day, Hunter fell right into the role that he had been created for, that very few human beings on the entire planet were as qualified to do as he was.
Hunter retired and sat around all day, with either his grandkids or other kids from the neighborhood that were sent over by their parents for a little free babysitting, and he told them stories. Bowling stories, hiking stories, stories about guys he had known in college, stories about a car he’d almost bought one time in Omaha; it never mattered. The kids would sit, transfixed, unable to be coaxed from his side even by the siren’s song of the television. He was the Joe DiMaggio of telling stories, the Michael Jordan--he was the TIGER WOODS of telling stories to kids.
Unfortunately, he was also the Tiger Woods of eating fatty foods and not exercising, so he died four years into his retirement. But his LEGACY, man, his legacy lives on, in all those kid’s...um...hearts, or something. Yeah, their hearts.
Hunter was the kind of guy who liked to exaggerate his stories, sometimes creating entire personalities for people from his past out of a few tiny fragments of behavior. This little diatribe about Dave had sprung from the events of a single night, when he had arrived at Dave’s while the aforementioned showering and primping had been in progress and had amused himself by doing shots of Rumpelmintz until he had passed out on the couch, vaguely aware that Dave had tried to rouse him at one point but remembering that he had been completely unable to respond in any coherent way. He had awakened the next morning nestled in the couch, with the unmistakable sour smell of vomit now emanating from under the cushion he was using as a pillow.
He didn’t tell Dave about the puke, either; that’s also the kind of guy that Hunter was. But he was pretty harmless; not the kind of buddy that you’d call if you REALLY needed help, but the kind that you just sort of left in your E-vite distribution list because it seemed kind of wrong when you thought about taking him out.
So Hunter just kind of slid through the world as an adult; found a pretty good job, got married a time or two, had some kids, moved around the country a little bit, all the standard stuff. But THEN, on one very magical day, Hunter fell right into the role that he had been created for, that very few human beings on the entire planet were as qualified to do as he was.
Hunter retired and sat around all day, with either his grandkids or other kids from the neighborhood that were sent over by their parents for a little free babysitting, and he told them stories. Bowling stories, hiking stories, stories about guys he had known in college, stories about a car he’d almost bought one time in Omaha; it never mattered. The kids would sit, transfixed, unable to be coaxed from his side even by the siren’s song of the television. He was the Joe DiMaggio of telling stories, the Michael Jordan--he was the TIGER WOODS of telling stories to kids.
Unfortunately, he was also the Tiger Woods of eating fatty foods and not exercising, so he died four years into his retirement. But his LEGACY, man, his legacy lives on, in all those kid’s...um...hearts, or something. Yeah, their hearts.
8.03.2008
Early August, early morning
There was a lot of darkness that night, somehow; I’m not sure if it was a new moon, or if there were just a couple of streetlights busted where I parked, but something ratcheted up the tension of parking along the street two blocks up from my condo at 4:30 in the morning. Usually just getting the car parked gave me a huge sense of relief; another trip home from somewhere way too far away under the influence of one thing or another (or several), a drive that even I couldn’t kid myself into believing was a good idea that hadn’t ended with me either sitting in jail or wrapped around a telephone pole.
Tonight, though, my nerves were still tight enough to make me drop my keys as I got out, which led to a solid two minutes of profanity-laced bending over, searching, crawling around, and near panic before my hand finally brushed one of my house keys, I think, and I was able to straighten up and start my stagger home.
I can’t even remember if I saw them first or heard them; two guys emerging from the alley in the middle of the block after I went by, the smell of a cigarette that one of them tossed into the street, an almost hypnotic rhythm of their footfalls and mine, counterpointed by their murmured conversation and the pounding of blood in my ears that was growing ever louder and more frantic.
I didn’t want to go into my building with them following, and I was quickly reaching a level of panic that I was afraid that I would no longer be able to contain, so I mounted the steps to one of the row houses that made up the block next to mine. I fumbled with my keys, both to give them time to walk by and because my hands were shaking uncontrollably, and I snuck glances at the two men as they grew closer. My heart stopped the same moment they did, less than five feet away from me, hard looks in both sets of eyes.
“Back off, man, I’ll call the cops...” I said thickly, trying to reach for my cell phone while not dropping my keys again, all the time thinking, “Is it ‘fire’ you’re supposed to yell if you want people to really respond to you? I know it’s not ‘help’...”
“Dude, are you high? This is my fucking house, so why don’t you get off my stoop before I call the cops,” the first one said.
Words like, “oh...yeah...shit...sorry...” all piled out of my mouth at the same time as I made a big show of looking at the number and “realizing” it wasn’t the right house. “I think I’m on the wrong block, man,” I ended on, weakly, and quickly resumed my walk home, risking only one glance back to see the two guys still looking after me in disbelief. I started laughing, and I couldn’t stop until long after I finally crawled into bed, a sick laughter that was equal parts relief and fear that persisted until it was finally overwhelmed, as I was, by merciful sleep.
Tonight, though, my nerves were still tight enough to make me drop my keys as I got out, which led to a solid two minutes of profanity-laced bending over, searching, crawling around, and near panic before my hand finally brushed one of my house keys, I think, and I was able to straighten up and start my stagger home.
I can’t even remember if I saw them first or heard them; two guys emerging from the alley in the middle of the block after I went by, the smell of a cigarette that one of them tossed into the street, an almost hypnotic rhythm of their footfalls and mine, counterpointed by their murmured conversation and the pounding of blood in my ears that was growing ever louder and more frantic.
I didn’t want to go into my building with them following, and I was quickly reaching a level of panic that I was afraid that I would no longer be able to contain, so I mounted the steps to one of the row houses that made up the block next to mine. I fumbled with my keys, both to give them time to walk by and because my hands were shaking uncontrollably, and I snuck glances at the two men as they grew closer. My heart stopped the same moment they did, less than five feet away from me, hard looks in both sets of eyes.
“Back off, man, I’ll call the cops...” I said thickly, trying to reach for my cell phone while not dropping my keys again, all the time thinking, “Is it ‘fire’ you’re supposed to yell if you want people to really respond to you? I know it’s not ‘help’...”
“Dude, are you high? This is my fucking house, so why don’t you get off my stoop before I call the cops,” the first one said.
Words like, “oh...yeah...shit...sorry...” all piled out of my mouth at the same time as I made a big show of looking at the number and “realizing” it wasn’t the right house. “I think I’m on the wrong block, man,” I ended on, weakly, and quickly resumed my walk home, risking only one glance back to see the two guys still looking after me in disbelief. I started laughing, and I couldn’t stop until long after I finally crawled into bed, a sick laughter that was equal parts relief and fear that persisted until it was finally overwhelmed, as I was, by merciful sleep.
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