This was not the kind of day he envisioned when he agreed to take on the position of Vice-President in charge of Planning and Executive Development. The title sounded innocuous, even friendly in a corporate world peppered with personal attacks from ever-grasping underlings. Quickly came the sandbag slung directly to the head and neck at his first board meeting. He walked from that meeting dizzy, staring at shoes, somehow arriving at his office. Sitting carefully into his chair sweaty shirt coolly clinging to the leather back he let the weight settle. He fingered the sheaf topmost titled “Systematic Executive Dismissal Planning & Execution”. Even the acronym repeated in the meeting sounded friendly, SEDPE, they pronounced it like “Said Pea”.
Then they made it into a verb saying “Jones will have to be Said Pea-ed”. Then they laughed and morphed it into “Reverez will have to Centipeded”. Then they dubbed him the “Centipede”. A harmless arthropod not, but a crawling, living under-rock, devoid of humanity, grasping-pulling-down-under creepy thing. Was it a siren from the street way below through the glass office wall? No it was the phone, three rings, and four.
He mechanically brought the receiver to his ear hearing his wife, “Can you pick up Jonny after soccer at the Y and bring him to band practice at the gym?” Tiny bits of sweat emerged across his lip as the mouthpiece brushed his cheek. His silence prompted another noise from the phone as he flipped to the first page of SEDPE.
“Honey, are you there?”
He read the names, Jones, Reverez, Hunsell, and on down the page each one with a day and time to be ushered into his office for the termination talk.
“Honey, are you listening?”
“Yes, what time. What time at the Y?”
“Four, look I got to go Sally’s waiting. We’re all meeting for coffee. See you, love you bye.”
“Bye,” he repeated and cradled the receiver in one hand held off the table by his elbow letting his forehead rest one the other palm pushing that elbow into the desk blotter. The names and dates blurred as he closed his eyes and sighed. Eyes still closed he let the receiver set into its cradle and opened his eyes to see a red-eyed housefly walking across the names on the page.
“Hail fellow arthropod.” He raised the phone hand high and in a ceremonious swing he smashed fly guts and blood into the paper. He turned over his hand to see the remains on his skin and the smeared over a few names. “Relative or not you’re dead”.
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2 comments:
Okay, now this is all stevens, all the way, which is to say it is creative nonfiction, not creative fiction. And it definitely sounds like stevens when he's firing on all cylinders and enjoying himself at the keyboard. Both my suppositions/assertions accurate so far?
It sounds like one of those things where there is this guy who has this dreadful job and the writer is trying to imaginatively step into his shoes and figure out what makes him tick. Yes?
Perfectly legitimate for our purposes at 162--I'm hashing this out in so much detail because you have the fictional techniques down so very well that I'm trying to reassure myself.
But those techniques are working nicely here. There's none of that sense of uncertainty that I wrote about last time where I pulled out the nervous phrasings.
In fact, this is a complete tale, not a fragment in any sense--beginning middle end, epiphany, the works.
Not too late to think about the Eyrie if you like.
Yes you are right on the mark. A friend in the consulting business told me the story of being hired as manager and shortly began firing people based on productivity. As I was writing a fly began hovering around the desk and you can guess what happen to it.
I will be pleased to put together another Eyrie submission.
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